In February 1987, Hassan Hamdan, the Lebanese Marxist intellectual who published under the name of Mahdi Amel, delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Hussein Mroueh in Damascus. A fellow member of the Lebanese Communist Party, Mroueh had been murdered in his bed at age 77. In the speech, Amel described his comrade’s killers as “enemies of freedom and thought, enemies of the scientific awakening and the revolution, enemies of the human,” and demanded an “Arab and international tribunal” to investigate a series of recent assassinations targeting leftist writers and thinkers. Two months later, a threatening article appeared in Al-Ahed, the weekly newspaper of a nascent Hezbollah: it warned that the speaker at Hussein Mroueh’s funeral would soon learn that his time had also come. In the following weeks, Amel took to pointing out that line to his wife and friends. “Here is my death sentence!” he would declare, laughing maniacally.
His apprehension was not misplaced. At 10:05 AM on May 18, while on his way to meet the writer and critic Yumna Al-Eid, Amel was shot with a silenced gun on Algeria Street in Beirut, near a Syrian military checkpoint. He was 51 years old.
Since the deaths of Mroueh and Amel, the image of a gun with a silencer has become a symbol of the political assassinations of many different critics of the prevailing order in Lebanon — from Communists to secular liberals to right-wing sectarians. Opposed to the same local power bloc of Hezbollah and the Assad regime, these ideological apples and oranges are often dumped into the same cart. Even Amel is often absorbed into a vaguely secular Lebanese opposition, while the necessary, challenging alliances he was party to — struggling against Zionism and American imperialism — are dismissed as mistakes of an overzealous past. But after the long cycle of struggles known as the Arab Spring and the global reawakening of solidarity with Palestine during the Gaza genocide, a disaggregation and reconstruction of the region’s many anticolonial intellectual currents is sorely needed. Amel’s ambitious thought and hard-fought life are central to this history.
Almost forty years after his assassination, Amel’s legacy has seen a belated revival, both at home and abroad. In 2021, Haymarket published Arab Marxism and National Liberation, which collects excerpts from six of Amel’s major texts, edited by Hicham Safieddine and translated into English for the first time (in a meticulous rendering by Angela Giordani). The same year the journal Critical Times ran a special section on Amel’s reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Amel’s papers, including his doctoral dissertation, have been digitized and are now accessible online through the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. These efforts have helped bring to light the scope and depth of Amel’s anticolonial thought, which ranged across national liberation, North–South imperial relations, sectarianism, armed struggle, national education, postcolonial Arabization, and cultural essentialism.
Equally illuminating is a bilingual biography by Evelyne Hamdan, Amel’s wife of nearly thirty years, which appeared in 2018, just two years before her death. Written in French and translated into Arabic by Roula Zoubiane, L’homme aux sandales de feu/رجل في خفين من نار (The man in sandals of fire) is a lumbering, peculiar book. More than a thousand pages long, the entire text addresses Evelyne’s deceased husband in the second person, with each chapter appearing twice, first in French, then in Arabic. The epistolary chapters describe to Amel, in heartfelt and often purple prose, his own qualities as a companion and impassioned lover: his style of dress and self-deprecating humor; the pair’s first meeting, in Lyon; his endurance of racialization in France; his discovery of French wines and cheeses; his cooking and hosting skills; his ecumenical reading habits; his tastes in the arts, which tended toward the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the novels of Kateb Yacine, and the paintings of Paul Klee; as well as his neuroses and nightly bouts of anxiety. More than a memoir of domestic intimacy, Evelyne’s book comes to encompass an anticolonial struggle waged on three continents. Early on in the book, Amel’s painstaking penmanship becomes a symbol for the act of writing against the void, against the quietism and nihilism to which even the most ardent can succumb in loss and war. In a late scene, Evelyne describes the crowds that overtook her in the funeral procession behind Amel’s coffin — the figure of the husband fading into the image of the venerated militant.
This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia — is real and widespread. Meme-like illustrated Amel quotes have circulated widely online since the advent of the Arab Spring. The two most popular of these are “You are not defeated as long as you continue to resist” and, less concise, “How can the revolution be unsoiled, when it is born of the present and soiled by it, before demolishing that present and washing itself with the promise that the human is beautiful and free?” The first evokes the rousing rhetoric of the Lebanese Communist martyr, the second the recondite terminology of the structuralist theorist. Yet neither gives the full tenor of Amel’s life, which he lived to the last moment in pursuit of liberation.
Mahdi Amel was born Hassan Hamdan in 1936 to a Shiite family from the Jabal Amel region in southern Lebanon. Throughout the French Mandate of 1923–43 and after, the region was known as a site of both oppression and radicalization for the Shia population. The Lebanese Communist Party established its first offices in the south the year he was born, and although the party did not keep official tallies, Shias were estimated to make up half its membership by the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Hamdan’s pen name and nom de guerre, adopted in the late ’60s, suggests a continued identification with the Jabal Amel area as well as a fascination with Islamic and Sufi theology. Amel is both a geographic reference and the Arabic word for “worker”; Mahdi is the awaited messiah figure, who holds singular eschatological heft in Shia Islam. The godly pomp was a kind of self-conscious joke, but the name stuck, in life and on the page.
As a teenager, Amel leaned toward Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism, until he was introduced to Marxism by his schoolteacher Shafiq Al-Hout, who would later become a spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Amel left Lebanon in 1956 to study philosophy at the University of Lyon; he and Evelyne met in May 1958, after attending a production of The Three Musketeers directed by the French playwright Roger Planchon, a student of Brecht, at a theater in the industrial suburb of Villeurbanne. It was the fourth year of the Algerian Revolution, and students were protesting de Gaulle’s return to power. In the play, Alexandre Dumas’s seventeenth-century narrative was transposed to the crisis of May 1958, when the Algerian colony’s generals broke with the French Fourth Republic, which they saw as unable to prevent Algerian independence. Evelyne and Hassan met on the bus platform: “Encircled by a ring of fire and madness,” she “plunged into the somber light of [his] eyes.”
The young couple shared a vibrant, radical intellectual life in Lyon. Theatergoing became a ritual, as did watching new films by Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Kaneto Shindo. Beyond Marx, and Marxists such as Fanon and Althusser, Amel read Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and the French phenomenologists (one of whom, Henri Maldiney, was Amel’s dissertation adviser), and the 14th-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Thinkers as varied as Pierre Bourdieu, the Egyptian French Marxist political scientist Anouar Abdel-Malek, and the French anthropologist Georges Balandier informed his readings on underdevelopment and national liberation, particularly concerning Algerian, Egyptian, and Kurdish autonomy. In the early ’60s, after taking part in countless meetings, protests, student assemblies, and antifascist marches, the Hamdans — who had recently married, against the wishes of Evelyne’s French parents — were contacted by an underground cell of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian Revolution, Evelyne narrates, “seize[d] hold of us and [tore] at our hearts.” They soon began smuggling cash to the FLN and their living room became a venue for covert meetings and militant intrigue through the war’s final years.
In 1963, a year after independence, Amel and Evelyne arrived in Algeria, by appointment of the newly established Algerian Ministry of National Education. In the northeastern city of Constantine, they taught philosophy and French, respectively, to public high school students. It had been two years since the death of Frantz Fanon, the great theorist of Algerian liberation; in 1964, “heeding” what Evelyne remembers as “the revolutionary Antillean call” of Fanon’s work, Amel published a memorial tribute in the French-language weekly Révolution africaine. Amel embraced what has been called Fanon’s antihumanist humanism, an ideal of universal human freedom that must nevertheless reckon with the hierarchies of slavery and colonialism abetted by humanist Enlightenment thought. (“Man made history,” Amel wrote; “the sub-human suffered it.”) In the essay Amel appraises Fanon’s poetics as well as his philosophy, defending Fanon’s conception of revolutionary violence from what Amel deemed its uncritically humanist and psychologizing uptake by the French existentialists. The violence of the colonized is a founding act, Amel insists — the beginning of a break from the historical trajectory imposed by colonialism.
The essay foreshadows much of Amel’s later work. In Fanon’s view, the Manichaean social and geographic divisions of the colonial world compel the colonized to see in black and white, making history appear antidialectical: in what Fanon, following Hegel, calls the moment of “immediate knowledge,” the colonized understand that there can be no dialogical relation or forms of mediation with the colonizer. Only after the colonized have erupted in similarly antidialectical violence can they experience a subsequent deepening of social consciousness, where, as Fanon writes, “not every Negro or Muslim is issued automatically a hallmark of genuineness.” Amel ends the essay with a section on postcolonial national culture, which finds itself caught between “a past that freezes, and a Europe that fascinates.” He acknowledges that his encounter with Fanon’s thought only begins to pose these problems of decolonization, without pretending to have solved them.
Facing these problems, postcolonial Algeria brimmed with both promise and risk. Amel and Evelyne’s time in Constantine coincided with the country’s tumultuous early years of independence and reconstruction, when national debates raged around the Arabization of Algerian self-governance and public life. Proponents of a monolingual Arab Islamist cultural policy, who prescribed an accelerated conversion from French to Standard Modern Arabic (fus’ha), met with pushback from Francophone elites and from advocates of colloquial Arabic (darija) and Indigenous Berber dialects alike. Among the latter was the novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine, who was harshly persecuted for writing in Tamazight; Amel became a fervent admirer and friend.
Informed by these controversies, Amel later published several essays on the colonial and classed nature of educational curricula in Lebanon, particularly language instruction. These were posthumously compiled in a lesser-known book called On Matters of Education and Teaching Policy (1991). Amel denounced any relegation of Arabic to the status of a romanticized “literary language.” Teaching Lebanese students in English or French, he insisted, led to a double estrangement, from the material world and from their mother tongue. Yet even as he maintained a firm anticolonial critique of the bilingualist ideals of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, Amel refused any stultifying monolingualism.
Although the Constantine years were characterized by spirited debate, the postcolonial state was marred by persistent privation and repression. Ben Bella, the nation’s first president, elected in 1963, centralized power until he was ousted in a coup in 1965. His military successor, Boumediene, abandoned programs for agricultural workers’ self-management and cracked down on opponents. All the while, statist policies expanded the Algerian bureaucracy with menacing intensity. In a grim footnote to L’homme aux sandales de feu, Evelyne describes the transformation of Constantine’s Sidi Rached Viaduct — a jewel of French colonial infrastructure, with its arches strung high in the air — into a suicide bridge. Running under the viaduct, the Rhumel River (“Valley of Sands” in Arabic) was, Evelyne writes, a “river of corpses.”
Around the time of the calamitous Arab defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967 — which Nasser euphemistically dubbed the Naksa, the “setback” — Amel and Evelyne decided to leave Constantine for Beirut, which was then relatively stable. “There is much to do there,” Amel often told his wife near the end of their time in Constantine. So began what would prove to be twenty years of life and work in Lebanon.
On arriving, they quickly found teaching positions in different high schools. A year later, Amel published the earliest version of his essay “Colonialism and Underdevelopment” in two installments in the Arabic communist journal Al-Tariq. Amel had initially approached the journal’s editor, Mohammed Dakroub, with a draft in French. Dakroub at first turned Amel down, insisting that the essay had to be published in Arabic if it was going to find the readership it deserved. Amel described his effort to rewrite the article in Arabic as “infernal torture,” but upon receiving the Arabic draft, Dakroub assessed its language as “Qur’anic.” That the process was so arduous, and the resulting language so polished, is continuous with Amel’s position in the Arabization debates: that innovative formulations in the Arabic language were needed to account for international developments in theory. The two-part essay, included in Arab Marxism and National Liberation, would form the basis of Theoretical Introductions to the Study of the Effect of Socialist Thought on National Liberation Movements (1972), Amel’s best-known book and arguably the master key to his theoretical corpus.
At the beginning of each installment, Amel looks to Marx and Lenin, outlining the limits of their respective projects once they alight on the colonial world. The first part of “Colonialism and Underdevelopment” argues that capitalism’s expansion into colonized countries through imperialism and foreign trade is a process of differentiation rather than identification. In their forces and relations of production, recently liberated countries are neither sites of an “underdeveloped” capitalism (per the developmentalists), nor patchworks of capitalist and precapitalist elements (per Lenin). Rather, their class structures are qualitatively different from those of their colonizers. Amel maintains that colonization in colonial societies plays a role analogous to that of bourgeois revolutions in the West. But unlike the European capitalist bourgeoisie — whose antagonism with the feudal class drives history forward — the colonial bourgeoisie is a mere peddler. It gets by on the graces of colonial overlords and is largely invested in mercantile and financial activity. Any domestic industry that is allowed to develop can only produce means of consumption, never means of production: “From the moment of its emergence,” Amel writes, “the colonial bourgeoisie was determined as a class in decline that must be annihilated for production to be transformed and liberated.” A prime example is in the numerous historic episodes of postindependence nations facing sanction or aggression by former colonizers and world powers following the new nations’ decisions to nationalize industry or means of transportation, such as the 1956 Tripartite Aggression of Israel, France, and Britain against Egypt after its nationalization of the Suez Canal. The distinct experience of formerly colonized nations after independence needed its own concept and name if it was to be adequately understood, let alone overturned; Amel summarized this system of structural dependence as the colonial mode of production (CMP).
The CMP produces strange symptoms, including what Amel calls “class substitution” and “class non-differentiation.” The first, building on the work of Fanon, refers to the shifting balance of power among factions of the bourgeoisie following formal independence or regime change. The settler-colonial bourgeoisie, for example, might be replaced by a “national” bourgeoisie — which in turn might be supplanted by a petty bourgeoisie of industrialists, as in the 1963 coup in Syria by the Ba’ath military committee and the ensuing Ba’athist regime. Non-differentiation, meanwhile, is a social phenomenon wherein forms of consciousness among the exploited classes — from landless peasants to small-scale industrial laborers — do not congeal around a stable class position, since they are exploited outside the formal sphere of productive capitalist industry. Another, related symptom of the CMP is its “impeded history”: rather than being leveled by capitalist development, as in the classic Marxian model, precolonial forms of identification such as sectarianism are reproduced indefinitely. The worker in the city continues to identify with his peasant ancestors’ orchards in the village; a Druze agricultural laborer refuses to see a wealthy Druze landowner as anything but blood kin.
To theorize the CMP, Amel adopts a structuralist idiom drawn from the French Marxist Louis Althusser, based in concepts such as contradictory unity, structural causality, and fusion. He also picks up Althusser’s suspicion toward the Hegelian dialectic, which he faults for its tendency to “dissolve differences,” and which, he claims, even coincides with the gradualist lexicon of development and underdevelopment. Yet where Althusser focused on the means by which an existing mode of production is reproduced, Amel is more interested in the temporality of revolutionary transformation. His theoretical formulations, then, should be understood as instruments of his revolutionary praxis, namely through Communist Party politics. Amel’s investment in party organization — culminating in armed resistance in solidarity with Palestinian liberation — is inseparable from his belief that the struggles of the toiling classes in postcolonial societies are objectively connected, both within one country and transnationally. “If class struggle against this single class enemy [colonialism] is not unified into one universal movement, then colonialism remains victorious,” he writes.
Amel’s CMP thus emerged from an idiosyncratic synthesis of Fanon and Althusser, assimilating their ideas as well as their troubled relationships to received Marxist-Hegelian schema. Among other things, the concept of the CMP was an attempt to re-situate the Fanonian understanding of colonialism as, in Amel’s words, a “structure insolent in its simplicity” after the moment of formal independence. Crucial to the CMP, Amel argues, is a kind of Manichaean division of historical time: capitalism in the West tends to subsume precapitalist relations into ostensibly secular market democracies, whereas in the former colonies, a stunted capitalism dooms the social structure to an endless loop of sectarian, tribal, and ethnic civil wars, military coups, and regime changes. The theory of the CMP rejects any “catch-up” capitalist developmentalism for the formerly colonized world. The CMP in the third world cannot be transcended, because it sustains the capitalist mode of production in the first world. In Amel’s schema, only an anticolonial world revolution can abolish the “structural unity” between the capitalist and colonial modes of production.
In the winter of 1969, around the time he published “Colonialism and Underdevelopment,” Amel joined the Lebanese Communist Party. At its Second and Third Congresses in 1968 and 1972, the LCP solidified its shift away from the official Soviet line, which had sidelined the Palestinian struggle. The party now held that the principal contradiction in the region was that between the Zionist project, Western imperialism, and Saudi reaction on one side, and the various Arab and Palestinian national liberation movements on the other. This reorientation would entail greater strategic cooperation with other political parties the LCP deemed progressive, including the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath Parties, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon (the last headed by the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, who legalized the LCP in 1972). Along with smaller groups to its left, such as the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL), the LCP was also supported by Lebanon’s emergent labor movement, whose actions included a major strike at the Gandour biscuit and candy factories in 1972.
But whatever unity existed among these groups — and among the intellectuals providing their theoretical blueprints — dissipated after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Early success for the Lebanese National Movement (a left coalition that included the LCP) was followed by rapid collapse: in 1976, the ground forces of the PLO and LNM controlled around 80 percent of Lebanese territory, prompting the Kissinger-approved Syrian invasion of Lebanon in May of that year. Less than a year later, Jumblatt, by then the leader of the LNM, was assassinated. After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the PLO was effectively expelled from the country, as Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut, massacring thousands of civilians and militants. At the start of the siege a new coalition, the Lebanese National Resistance Front (known by its Arabic acronym, Jammoul), was founded and carried out numerous guerrilla attacks against the Israeli occupation in Beirut and the south. But by the mid-1980s the Syrian regime’s growing hostility toward Jammoul and the LCP, alongside the formation and growth of Hezbollah and the Amal Movement, had effectively wrested popular Shia allegiance from the LCP.
As the war wore on, ever fewer intellectuals were able to see any clear progressive cause or commitment on any side. It was in this torrid ideological climate that Amel intensified his work with the LCP, deepening his defense of Marxism as a form of scientific thought. Well after the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance from Lebanon, Amel maintained his anticolonial Marxist line. He remained convinced that the Lebanese bourgeoisie — not least the segment that had turned to pro-Israel collaborationism and Christian Maronite fascism during the war — was still built in the image that French colonialism had constructed. This was another distinctive feature of his thought: Amel understood contemporary sectarianism not as a popular cultural heritage or vestigial backwardness, but as a distinctly modern formation, a system of bourgeois domination enshrined in Lebanese law during the French Mandate and further consolidated after nominal independence. “If the French Mandate, thanks to the 1926 constitution, laid the (sectarian) foundation of this system, then the Lebanese bourgeoisie subsequently completed this system’s construction and strengthened it,” he wrote. Premodern social forms, such as sectarianism or tribalism, are inscribed into law during colonialism and entrenched further after independence; the progression of the CMP intensifies them rather than relegating them to the past.
Throughout the 1980s, Amel grew more strident in his criticisms of LCP leaders and fellow-traveling thinkers, whose commitment to historical materialism was allegedly faltering. In her memoir, Evelyne describes an almost Hamletian episode: after an LCP central committee meeting, Amel feigned drunkenness and, wineglass in hand, harangued the assembled members, airing grievances he had previously kept quiet. Yet whatever was said behind closed doors, Amel continued to toe the Party line religiously in public, as the exigencies of a war of national liberation required. According to Evelyne, even Amel’s friends wondered at the intensity of his party loyalty: when Amel sought and won election to the central committee, he was told by peers outside the LCP that for an intellectual like him, “the position [was] not his place” — if not to protect his epistemological independence, then for his physical security. By then the serial assassinations that Evelyne calls the “Black Terror” were already underway. In addition to Amel and Hussein Mroueh, the LCP’s two most revered intellectuals, the killings of 1986–87 would target Suhail Tawileh, editor in chief of the party’s weekly magazine, Al-Nidaa; Khalil Naous, a leading LCP member; and Nour Toukan, an LCP member and celebrated musician, among many others. Yet Amel continued his frenzied political activity throughout the war, while Evelyne worried constantly for his safety. He lectured communist fighters at rallies across the country and served as the LNM’s official envoy to the Gaddafi regime in Libya (on his return, Amel was held up on the airport tarmac for interrogation by rival LNM factions). Amel and the LCP’s involvement with Gaddafi — who lavishly funded national liberation movements in exchange for political support — makes up only a short and approving footnote in L’homme aux sandales de feu. After all her work preserving, transcribing, and propagating Amel’s oeuvre in the decades since his assassination, Evelyne still seems to share his political assessments and allegiances, as if maintaining a marital united front. Elsewhere she is quick to mention Amel’s contribution to the cooking and housework, and his hatred of the gendered division of labor — an attitude, she notes, that he held even “before the feminist movements.” But she also makes clear that it was her own reproductive labor, alongside her student organizing and teaching jobs, that allowed Amel to apply himself to writing despite their limited means. Evelyne writes that in the last three years of his life, Amel grew increasingly pained and solitary, consumed by the military and political defeats of the LNM and the LCP, his disputes with LCP leadership, and the marginalization of Marxism in the region.
Amel’s first posthumously published book, The Critique of Everyday Thought (1988), collects his extended rebukes to an Arab left that he saw drifting away from historical materialism and into what he taxonomized as “nihilist,” “culturalist-obscurantist,” and “bourgeois Islamisant” tendencies. Naming prominent writers and intellectuals — such as Elias Khoury, Adonis, Abbas Beydoun, and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm — Amel attacks nihilists for their obfuscation of distinct ideologies and class formations in the civil war; the obscurantists for promoting a Lebanese and Arab cultural identity supposedly beyond the grasp of materialist thought; and the bourgeois Islamisants for their spurious portrayal of socialism as merely one half, along with capitalism, of the Janus face of Western thought.
One of the key texts in Arab Marxism and National Liberation, and among the most original, is Amel’s rejoinder to Edward Said’s Orientalism, excerpted from Amel’s short, bitingly titled book Does the Heart Belong to the East and the Mind to the West?, published in 1985. Said, Amel argues, imposes a flattening logic that reduces all attempts at rational thought originating in the West, regardless of its history or class character, to mere nationalist ideologizing on behalf of the white, Christian West. Amel counters that what Said deems dominant Western culture is only the culture of the dominant class within the West, and cannot comprise the activity of all individual “Western” thinkers. Even Marx himself is acquitted by Said of the charge of orientalism only in those brief moments when, in The British Rule in India (1853), Marx uses his “heart” to sympathize with the victims of Western imperialism: “The only approach to the East capable of delivering the thinker from the danger of falling in the logic of Western thought,” Amel observes, “is a heartfelt spiritual, as opposed to rational, approach,” an act “of ‘identifying’ with ‘the vital forces’ informing ‘Eastern culture.’” Thus, Amel contends, Said ultimately reproduces the very binaries he set out to scrutinize: that of the individual and the nation in discursive production, and that of the epistemological split that associates rational knowledge with “the West,” and extrarational forms — such as spiritualism and mysticism — with “the East.” For his part, Said described his Arab critics, including Amel, as “dogmatic,” bent on chastising Said for “not having paid closer attention to Marx.” But what Amel and others were pointing out was that, by reducing Marxism to a mere faction within bourgeois imperialist thought, Said unwittingly ended up in the same boat as counterrevolutionary nativists, religious orators, and the national bourgeoisie.
Amel’s defense of Marxism, even and especially against those who were politically adjacent to it, was dogged and often acerbic. This was in part the embattled posture of a thinker who rose to Communist leadership at the twilight of 20th-century socialism, as his party was increasingly sidelined in Lebanese politics. But the arguments and polemics of The Critique of Everyday Thought and Does the Heart Belong to the East were not born of mere bitterness; they resound with moral force and rhetorical flair. Early in The Critique of Everyday Thought, in a section titled “Against the Obscurantism of the Age, the Soundness of the Mind,” Amel calls to “let militant thought enter into a struggle that compels our steps onto the path of laughing necessity. It is ever ripe, it is forever lucid, and in revolutionary movement it is sown and takes root.”
Assassinated just before the end of the civil war, Amel did not have to witness the worst of its aftermath, including an Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that lasted until 2000. Since its founding in 1989, the so-called Second Lebanese Republic has been marked by mass privatization; the destruction and co-optation of organized labor; rampant financialization, resulting in the 2020 economic crisis; severe unemployment and hyperinflation; and deepening sectarian clientelism within and outside the state. The years between the war and the recent economic collapse also saw an influx of migrant labor, through the sponsorship (Kafala) system. Migrant laborers — often African and South Asian women in domestic work, or Syrian men in construction — are excluded from labor law and paid wages far below the national minimum. In addition to the 1.5 million Syrian refugees who have arrived since 2011, and the almost half million Palestinians still living as refugees in Lebanon four generations after the Nakba, these migrant workers constitute the country’s reserve army of labor: poorly paid, easily disciplined, and readily replaced.
This expanded working class remains powerful yet fractured, in ways that Amel would recognize. The October 2019 uprising against Lebanon’s sectarian ruling elite was preceded by a summer of protests in the Palestinian camps. The protesters rebelled against a racist law that would impose new labor restrictions on refugees, a bid to force Syrian refugees to return to their country after the presumed end of the Syrian civil war. A key task of revolutionary thought is to transcend the reification of a singular, homogenous “people,” and deconstruct the false binaries that divide the working classes between waged and wageless, national and identitarian, productive and reproductive. These were Amel’s enduring concerns, and the questions his work still illuminates.
For Amel’s other great causes, national liberation and sovereignty, Palestine remains the standard-bearer and geopolitical fulcrum. No less than in Amel’s time, there is a dire need for systematic understanding of Zionist settler colonialism as a primary enforcer of American hegemony. To do justice to the anticolonial legacy of Amel and other fallen militants is to contend with the reality that the main combatants against Zionism in the region, such as Hezbollah, do not fit the political criteria of most leftist movements, and are often in conflict with them. Likewise, the valiance of those who fight the colonizer under the yellow and green flag of the Hezb must somehow be squared with the terror and death inflicted on Syrian dissidents by the Assad regime and Hezbollah itself. This is a tragic contradiction that must be constantly negotiated. But legitimate leftist opposition to other political actors fighting the colonizer must never play into the colonizer’s own hands — especially not in moments of all-out colonial war. It was in this spirit that Amel and other Lebanese communists joined with secular and sectarian forces alike to form the broad anticolonial front of the Lebanese National Movement. And it is in this same spirit that the secular Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine fight alongside Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others in Gaza today. After all, “how can the revolution be unsoiled?”
The concrete dilemmas that Amel faced and the answers he tried to articulate continue to provide models for a unity of revolutionary thought and action. Like his other formulations, Amel’s colonial mode of production is an artifact of struggle, developed at a time of worsening defeat, from the 1967 Naksa to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance and the left during the Lebanese Civil War. It is an ambitious but practical theoretical apparatus, meant to link the battles of far-flung societies and their toiling classes, in and after the crucible of national independence. That tenacity of thought can guide us in understanding and supporting today’s forms of anticolonial and Indigenous resistance. “You are not defeated as long as you continue to resist”: We return to these words, before we turn to face the world.
