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Elia Ayoub (he/him)

My latest: 's lost communist future, a look at Maher Abi Samra's 2011 film 'We Were Communists'

hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-lo

Some extracts

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.
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.
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.
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.
Elia Ayoub (he/him)

Scene featured in the text: Ibrahim, former communist who joined , talking to Maher Abi Samra

hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-lo

#Lebanon
Jan 27, 2025, 04:49 PM·Public
2boosts·3favorites
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Elia Ayoub (he/him)

Scene featured in the text: the ex-comrades of the Lebanese Communist Party being interviewed

hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-lo

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Elia Ayoub (he/him)

The audio version of the above is available on hauntologies.net

Otherwise, it's out on Patreon tomorrow and on all public feeds this Friday

spore.social/@ayoub/1138967233

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