Lebanon's Lost Communist Future

What Maher Abi Samra's "We Were Communists" (2011) says about the present

This is a long one folks, but I hope you'll enjoy it. There is a lot more that I wish to write: consider that the following is an expansion of one section of my PhD, so roughly 6 pages out of around 440. Each section raises interesting questions (if I may say so myself) that I would like to explore. There aren't many people out there who take something so niche - Lebanese cinema - and explores its global implications, so I hope you appreciate how difficult it is to fight the urge to archive that entire dissertation. Pitching it to various sites is difficult because it's rarely seen as worthy enough. If it is, it is more often than not unpaid. If you wish to publish or translate this or similar content, feel free to reach out.

If you would like to listen to the audio version of this, it is at the bottom of this article and is for paid subscribers only.

Anyway, I look forward to reading/hearing your thoughts.

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In We Were Communists (2011) by Maher Abi Samra, the director and three of his ex-comrades of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) - Hussein Ali Ayoub, Bashar Nadim Abdel Saad, Ibrahim Mohamad Ali Amine - get together to reflect on their past as young communists during the Lebanese civil wars of 1975-1990.¹

The film uses strategies of re-enactement as a way of putting the past into productive conflict with the political present. Basically: They remember by, quite literally, placing themselves in positions in a room to facilitate a process of collective thinking.

In We Were Communists, we get to witness the crumbling of a vision of the future that was still dominant in the 1980s, one that was nominally communist or at least broadly left-wing: it allows us to ask what does it mean to lose the future? I’ll try and answer that here. At the very least, it is an answer among, I'm sure, many.

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Most of the story occurs after the Israeli invasion of 1982, cited by all attendees as pivotal to their decision to join the LCP. At the time, prior to the rise of Hezbollah, the LCP was the most organized anti-sectarian Lebanese group involved in the resistance to the Israeli invasion and occupation. As a result, it attracted a lot of young men² from both working and middle class backgrounds and from all parts of Lebanon, among them our protagonists.

The first scenes are of the four of them introducing themselves. Notably, three of them include their sectarian affiliations: two Shias and one Sunni.³ These affiliations, we soon learn, are believed by our protagonists to be one of the main reasons behind the LCP's decline, a sort of sectarian elephant in the room that would end up haunting this explicitly anti-sectarian group of people.

The LCP, however, did not just resist the Israeli occupation. They also fought against other Lebanese factions, which they call the ‘internal wars’⁴. Maher identifies this as one of the main reasons the LCP declined as it put them in a position of defensiveness. Most importantly, the LCP was no longer in the business of proposing alternative visions for the country.

This weakened them relative to Hezbollah, a movement with far better funding and weapons to be used in the resistance against Israel, or at least contributed to it.

Indeed, the urgency of the Israeli occupation even pushed communists like Ibrahim to join Hezbollah, a group antithetical to communist beliefs. Maher and Bashar, meanwhile, identify Hezbollah as the reason behind the resistance's sectarianization - literally: the processes that create what is called sectarianism.

I will focus on what Ibrahim had to say because I think it reveals much more than what he likely intended:

When we entered LCP headquarters, it was as if there was a safety deposit box into which we removed our sects, our families, our communities, and placed them in safe keeping. Then we melted inside the party. When the party collapsed and we left, each one of us collected their deposits and went back home. [We became] a Shia communist, or Christian communist, or Druze communist, back to being influenced by the same [sectarian] calculations.

Here's an extract which includes this scene.

The sectarian elephant in the room turned out to be larger than mere shifts in personal perceptions vis-a-vis sect and religion, but instead represented the final nail in the coffin of the communist future. Sectarianism is described by Ibrahim as some form of social gravity towards which all Lebanese are inevitably drawn towards. Those young men who joined a party with an explicitly utopian vision of the future found themselves collecting their sectarian ‘deposits.’ Those who remained anti-sectarian, meanwhile, were condemned to live the ‘postwar’ with a general sense of purposelessness.

This absent futurity, the what-could-have-been, the what-if, haunts these men throughout We Were Communists. Even before joining Hezbollah, the sectarian ghost was already present in Ibrahim's mind who said:

I would come back to the periphery, the edges of the sect. I hovered around it.

Just as he had to put his sect aside when he joined the LCP, he is being told to put his communist past aside to be welcomed back into his sectarian identity.⁵ To meet his former LCP comrades, then, Ibrahim simply put his sectarian deposit in the safety box for the required duration.

Sectarian realism

At the same time, Ibrahim seems to have accepted sectarianism as a fact of life in Lebanon, and therefore believes that the communist future was never going to happen because the sectarian past is too great a force. He says that if the LCP was not able to unite the sects, no one would have ever been able to. So, he concluded, he had no choice but to join Hezbollah.

It is as if he is disagreeing with his own past. More revealingly, I think, Ibrahim argues that all LCP members approached their sects in the same way, hence his deposit analogy. We can call this sectarian realism, a belief in the inevitability of sectarianism which in turn influences belief in what is possible and what is not.⁶ He is factually wrong, of course, as not all ex-LCP members joined sectarian parties:⁷ Not all of them treated ‘their’ sects as deposit boxes.

What Ibrahim believes to be pragmatism was in fact the abandonment of a possible future. After all, he could have joined Hezbollah while maintaining his belief in a communist future - arguing that they have better guns which were needed to resist Israel, for example. He certainly wouldn't have been the first idealist forced into less-ideal situations, as the anarchists who took part in the Spanish civil war against Franco's forces could testify: ‘Stalin had better guns, we need those to resist Franco,’ and so on. Those who relied on American support in the fight against ISIS in Rojava did not have to espouse American imperialism anymore than the Ukrainians who depend on Western weapons to fight Russian imperialism are required to like the fact of this dependence.

Instead, Ibrahim also integrated Hezbollah's own worldview after joining the party. His vision of the future changed then and there. Later, while remembering this past, he retroactively inserted his new timeline on the old one, as if adopting Hezbollah's hierarchical and future-less worldview was inevitable.

This shows that sectarianization is a process or rather processes that evolve over time. Sectarianism is not a static state of affair, something that one is just born with. It is a social construct. The ‘pragmatic’ solution he reached goes against the professed ideals of the LCP, but Ibrahim implies that this ‘pragmatism’, this form of sectarian calculations that I've identified as sectarian realism, was always there within the LCP members themselves. All that was needed was for time to pass for the ideal futurity to be replaced by a pragmatic, maybe even cynical or defeatist, present.

The four are joined by their former commander Abu Mohsen to remember one particular battle

The collapse

Towards the end of the film, another one of the ex-LCP members, Hussein, describes the circumstances of his leaving the party in 1993:

There was a general collapse in the world [collapse of the USSR], a general collapse in the region [first Gulf war], in the country, in the party, and so on. One project was collapsing [state communism], and another was rising [neoliberalism]."

Facing these collapses, Hussein decided to withdraw from politics and focus on himself.

Here's an extract that includes this scene:

This feeling of collapse that Hussein described was picked up again in the aftermath of the October 2019 uprising⁸ leading to what journalist Lara Bitar called evaporation of euphoria.

The uprising itself, which I was lucky enough to witness and take part in, did indeed feel like collective euphoria. The excellent writer Lina Mounzer, who was also there, described it as a "feeling greater than love"⁹ while a feminist collective released a 2020 calendar with the entry for October featuring signs that read "the civil war is now over."

Nour El Bejjani Noureddine asked whether the uprising will "finally bring Lebanon to a reckoning with its past" while Alexandra Kassir wondered whether it marks indeed the end of the Lebanese wars. One protester told journalist Kareem Chehayeb that "we need to believe it is important to be happy, not just to survive." And Camille Ammoun, writing a month into the uprising, declared that "the crisis is such that it is no longer a matter of planning the future. We must first recreate the present," adding that "tomorrow is dead.”¹⁰

The uprising was followed by both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the apocalyptic port of Beirut explosion in 2020. This was the end of that brief period of hope that participants of the October uprising felt and described. The evaporation of euphoria led once again to what Hussein described, namely many people withdrawing into their own sectarian or regional comfort zones and refrain from engaging in wider politics. The parallels are striking.

Hussein, however, presents a different case study than Ibrahim does. In many ways, Hussein's reasoning is much more straightforward. He gave up, and understandably so. I think if we accept that, he becomes a understandable, even sympathetic, character.

Ibrahim is different though. He re-wrote his future, with the belief that he was merely being pragmatic. In fact we see him sort of admitting this when he recognized that he liked being referred by the honorific Sayyid by Hezbollah members. He did not wear that title with complete ease, however. He says that it made him sometimes uncomfortable.

Here's an extract that includes that scene:

I cannot prove this of course, but I think this is due to the fact that Ibrahim went a step further than Hussein did. In re-writing the past and interpreting that act as though the past was always going to lead to his future-less Hezbollah future, Ibrahim must have erased something of himself, something he never quite came to terms with.

This is what losing the future does to you. It's not that he had to accept a communist future in order to avoid this conundrum but rather that the way he accepted Hezbollah's future-less future required him to change something fundamental about the way he was approaching the world.

The future was never written. There was never any guarantee that it would end up being the communist one, or Hezbollah's lack of one. It could have easily been neither, and in many ways it was neither: Hezbollah integrated itself into the Lebanese sectarian system anyway, a process which permanently changed the party, including its idealism, which is what Ibrahim tells us appealed to him in the first place.

Archives of lost futures

As mentioned, We Were Communists deployed the physical bodies of its participants to encourage a process of collective recollection, or re-membering.

It also highlighted the practice of going through archives to understand what ‘went wrong.’ For example, Maher makes use of his access to the LCP to dig through their archives and learn about a 1987 battle that the LCP took part in and which he and Bashar cite as the beginning of the end of the party.

The specifics of the battle are not relevant here, but what is interesting is that Maher was able to pinpoint a specific date as the beginning of the end. This creates a what-if that viewers of We Were Communists may entertain, wondering whether events could have turned out differently. In that what-if, the communist future, instead of being lost, is the present. Or rather, it could be. It's no longer this impossible thing that was always condemned to get stuck in the past.

The Lebanese scholar Fadi Bardawil once told me that the value of digging up Lebanon's left-wing heritage is to serve as "an intergenerational conversation," to explore the successes and failures of a previous generation to help inform the younger ones. He also described it in archeological terms, as "excavating the experiences" of left-wing groups of the past.¹¹ Bardawil suggests that the people whose thoughts he excavates believed that their own theoretical investigations and readings "were geared towards an intervention in the present."¹²

This is of crucial importance because, as we see in We Were Communists, whatever Left futurities they were proposing were unable to withstand internal contradictions within parties like the LCP in the face of either nationalism, sectarianism or Islamism.¹³ Exploring these contradictions by digging up the relevant archives can be really useful for us to learn from their experiences and understand what went wrong.

I don't know whether the 'lost' characteristic of this temporality is permanent or not.¹⁴ For example, in Palestinina cinema we often see the "not yet" temporality as the dominant one.

What the "not yet" implies is a deep uncertainty. Not yet does not mean never, but it also does not entirely exclude that possibility either. If we apply this temporality instead of a lost future, we would conclude that, maybe, the communist future in We Were Communists is also a not yet. But there are no guarantees.

In any case, such archives point to a utopia that never came to pass. By bracketing such an archive, we allow the past to speak on its own terms, and put it in conversation with the present. It requires a bit of a mind hack, if you'll allow me this term here.

It means looking at what the past thought of as the future while remembering that it was always the present. Let me make this less confusing (inshallah): We Were Communists reenacts the past in the present. This allows us, as the viewer, to project ourselves in the past with our main characters. By suspending disbelief, we can start seeing that past as the present, which is what it was. That's what we do when we watch a movie. We project ourselves into that world, and even adopt its temporality. You can be sitting on your sofa in the year 2025 but can temporarily, for the duration of the movie, be in WWII France or Islamic Spain or Julius Caesar's Rome. Same for books obviously.

Back to We Were Communists: That present, the present of the 1980s (which is now the past - I know, I'm sorry), had a future that, at the time, had not happened yet. We know what that past's future ended up being because we have the obvious advantage of being in it - that's what we call the present. The ‘mind hack’ is actually just remembering that our present ended up being that past's future, but it did not have to be. It just did. It could have happened differently, and this conversation would be a different one, although the principle would be the same. I could be talking about We Were Hezbollah, or whatever, and modified some words here and there, but the idea is still to look at the past on its own terms.

The specifics of that future utopia - whether it will be communist, whatever that means, or something else - are unknown, but I think it is hopeful that it may still haunt our future-less present. This does not require that communist future to even be desirable. I for one think it would have had its fair shares of flaws, some of which may have been as fatal as it was for the USSR, particularly its brand of authoritarian state communism (and here I won't go into the debates of whether the USSR was really communist or not). But the fact that we can entertain that what-if with as much seriousness as we would supposedly deal with our current present moment is hopeful. It says that our present moment is as uncertain as its various alternatives in these various what-ifs.

So Ibrahim, in his own way, offers us a valuable lesson. The LCP's decline was no more inevitable as Hezbollah’s rise was. That is just what happened. We can look at what happened and identify why it happened. This allows to also identify how it could have happened differently.

Again, the future is unwritten, and it is worth remembering that. Otherwise, we take the present for granted and that is effectively the same as expecting the present to be endlessly reproduced into the future. Why would anyone conclude that the future could be different, let alone better? This is the fundamental flaw in the realisms of our present, whether it be Ibrahim's sectarian realism or the much more globally widespread capitalist realism, to which we might add patriarchal realism, and so on. But these are real-isms. They are themselves beliefs that take a whole lot of variables as being constant. They are not. They change all the time, for better and for worse.

The challenge, I think, is accepting that future uncertainty as a given fact of living in the present while also recognizing that acting in the present with a certain future in mind does impact that future's likelihood. This shouldn't be confused with some ‘the secret’ bullshit, but simply the logical conclusion reached by accepting that the future is unwritten and unpredictable. There is nothing in the stars that, for example, says that a dictator cannot collapse pretty quickly - just ask Bashar Al-Assad. There is no reason to believe that the world we currently live in will always be this way, that the specific configuration of, say, nation states and neoliberal capitalism, will continue into the future forever. They may for a period of time, but at some point they simply won't anymore. At the risk of sounding cheese-y again, nothing is permanent, and certainly no human social construct is.

Caption: the men being interviewed

David Graeber was right when he pointed out that ‘the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.' Ibrahim was mistaken in concluding that this world could not be made differently, but he is far from being a rare case today. Most people today who view themselves as critical thinkers seem to have concluded that there is something fundamentally truer about pessimism than about optimism.

I disagree. To ‘be’ a pessimist requires a sort of circular reasoning, in addition to misunderstanding what optimism, at least the version that hopefully comes across in this piece, is about. It is not a passive belief that things always work out - they very evidently do not. It just means accepting that the future can be better. It means that there is something that we can identify in the present, in the world we live in, that we can actually improve in ways that are concrete, that people will actually feel. And we should never conclude that this is not worth engaging in.

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Finally, here is the audio commentary: