The positions of the Lebanese Communist Party and its leadership are not totally comprehensible. Their despair and rage are appropriate, be it due to the resumption of Lebanon's subjection to Israeli occupation or because of their solidarity with the civilian victims of the genocidal war in Gaza. This sentiment, which of course goes far beyond the party itself, has not been coupled, however, with recognition of fundamentally different, other shifts. Mind you, these other shifts directly concern the communists, traditionally a group that presents itself as the specialist of identifying and evaluating transformative change.
Restricting armament to the state’ agencies and armed forces has been the most prominent political issue in Lebanon for months now. If the effort to do so ultimately succeeds, liberating the communists’ activism from its fear of these arms, and from its subordination to the party that carries them, would become possible.
It would also allow for not defining the communist party’s politics around this element that, ironically, incapacitates any and every partisan life. After all, these arms had previously tied the Lebanese Communist Party behind the factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization before tying it behind Hezbollah. The communists' relationship with their armed ally was a tragedy - the latter assassinated leading Communist Party intellectuals and politicians, as well as some of their cadres and militants, and, through violence and intimidation, prevented the communists from playing any role in the resistance they hold so dear.
However, the Communists now have a chance at liberation from the security regimes of "national liberation" that killed two communist leaders - Farajallah al-Helou (in 1959) and George Hawi (in 2005) - especially in light of the former Syrian regime’s collapse. Such incidents were not limited to Lebanon. Communist leaders across the Arab world met the same fate: from Egypt’s Shadi Attiya al-Shafei (assassinated by Nasser’s agencies in 1960) to Iraq’s Salam Adel (by the Baathists in 1963) to Sudan’s Abdel Khaleq Mahjoub and al-Shafi Ahmed al-Sheikh (executed in 1971 by Gaafar Nimeiry, who was a Nasserist at the time). These figures, among others, did not die at the hands of "reactionaries and imperialists;" they were taken out by the officers and police states that the communists painted as "patriotic and progressive."
Accordingly, the current conditions taking shape are conducive to the communists and their parties’ recovery from the historical masochism that drove them to reward all the pain inflicted by these authoritarian states and militias with loyalty and obedience. Such recovery would, in turn, allow the Lebanese communists to reassess the tragedy of their existence since their second conference in 1968, which turned them into an auxiliary of these “patriots” and “Arab nationalists” who were diligently exterminating them.
Nonetheless, that all happened in the interval between two prominent junctures: after their Egyptian comrades’ dissolution of their party organizations into Nasser’s “Arab Socialist Union” and before their comrades in Syria and Iraq joined the “progressive and national fronts’’ engineered by the Baath party. Indeed, only the least nationalistic - or anti-nationalist - of the communists’ positions, such as their decisions to accept the partition of Palestine in 1947 and to oppose Egyptian-Syrian unity in 1958, were "vindicated by subsequent events.”
If one wants to broaden the reassessment and its scope, it might be useful to reexamine the experience of the Soviet Union and its collapse. Under the weight of poor assumptions and their police states, the public discourse around this question has, in recent decades, mostly been focused on the negative repercussions of this collapse for the communists and their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, the latter can reconsider the freedoms that this collapse had afforded, and the possibilities that come with them - revisiting the policies desperately needed by their societies that were made viable, as well as the harmful policies dictated by the Great Comrade in Moscow that were made optional.
Given that the Sudanese communist Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim became the first woman to enter an Arab parliament in 1965, and that the Iraqi communist Naziha al-Dulaimi became the Arab world’s first woman minister in 1959, the decline of Islamist groups hostile to women should come as good news to the communists. Beyond that, the resulting reduction of the space religion occupies in the political sphere could open doors that had been locked shut.
All of that can only empower democratic and peaceful engagement across the public sphere - in politics, syndicates, and the media - to whoever chooses this path. It also removes barriers faced by advocates preaching (yes, preaching) values they consider enlightening, progressive, and sensible. Communists, in a world devoid of weapons and militants, could be particularly keen on taking the chance to be as radical as they wish on questioning injustice and inequality, sectarian behavior, the transgressions of the "financial junta" and banks, corruption, and the aggressive weaponization of the law...
Regarding Israel, they can, of course, put more weight behind their push in favor of ending its occupation and against peace and normalization; they could also more ardently advocate for the defense strategy that they believe would protect Lebanon from it. Indeed, if they wish, they continue to smear NATO and denounce the schemes and conspiracies they accuse it of orchestrating.
After all, a life without weapons has space for many things and many voices, including the voice of the communists, however they choose to use it and whatever they choose to amplify. As for life under the shadow of weapons, it is one of peril - all life, not just the lives of the communists and other parties.
