Social Classes and Political Power in Lebanon
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Social Classes This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung - Middle East Office. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and can therefore in no way be taken to reflect the opinion of the Foundation. and Political Power in Lebanon Fawwaz Traboulsi Social Classes and Political Power in Lebanon Fawwaz Traboulsi This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung - Middle East Office. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and can therefore in no way be taken to reflect the opinion of the Foundation. Content 1- Methodology ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 4 2- From Liberalism to Neoliberalism .................................................................................................................................... 23 3- The Oligarchy ................................................................................................................................................................................. 30 4- The Middle Classes............................................................................................................................... ..................................... 44 5- The Working Classes .................................................................................................................................................................. 56 6- Economic Power and Political Power .............................................................................................................................. 75 7- Conclusions ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 98 Appendix 1: Sects and Their Political Representation.............................................................................................. 101 Appendix 2: Holding Companies .......................................................................................................................................... 102 Endnotes ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 117 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 121 Chapter 1 Methodology 1- Denial The denial of the existence of class comes as no surprise. Every social system exercises its own special logic when it comes to concealing manifestations of privilege, inequality and exploitation between its members. What counts is the means by which this denial and the various forms of cover-up and distortion are effected. The denial of exploitation On the subject of the denial of exploitation in Lebanon, Michel Chiha writes that the Lebanese, “[…] derives his wealth from the farthest corners of the earth and does no harm to any of his Lebanese brothers far away at home or exploits the sweat of his fellow-citizens. In the final analysis he is immune to criticism by either socialist or sociologist, and in any case there is no one in the world so lavishly generous as he” (Chiha: 1962, 130). The Lebanese in question is assumed to operate in the diaspora, just as the wealth he accrues in “the farthest corners of the earth” is presumed not to generate a domestic economic and social system that harms the broad mass of Lebanese, nor to exploit the labour of those who are “far away” from the source of this wealth - but not so “far away” from where this wealth is invested.. The denial of the existence of vast wealth In the same way, Ghassan Teuni denies that the Lebanese themselves possess vast wealth, because they work with the wealth of others without this wealth being their own “legitimate property.” (Ghassan Tueni: Al Nahar Annual Edition, 1966). This is a revealing slip of the tongue about the distinction between (religiously) legitimate and illegitimate earnings, which shows an ongoing obsession with the idea of religious prohibitions surrounding wealth and the owners of wealth that calls to mind Christ’s words about the poor odds of the wealthy entering the Kingdom of Heaven. In any case, there is no real difference between working with the funds of others and the accumulation of vast fortunes, indeed quite the opposite is true, since the wealthiest Lebanese of all are those who amassed their millions or billions outside the country, brokering the wealth of others. The denial and ‘othering’ of poverty Michel Chiha claims the poor of post-independence Lebanon come from those regions and territories annexed to Mount Lebanon and the coast to form the state of Greater Lebanon in 1920. He is careful to distinguish between the peasant farmer of Mount Lebanon (i.e. Smaller Lebanon) and the influx of poor immigrants from the annexed regions to the coastal cities (Lecture entitled Methodology 7 “Commerce and Morals” delivered in French in 1940 and republished in L’Orient-Le Jour on 28/12/1994). Chiha does not hesitate to call for this poverty - and these poor individuals - to be hidden away, at the very least from the eyes of tourists and summer visitors: “Let us start by issuing standard uniforms and cleaning implements to the porters at the docks and train stations” (Traboulsi: 1999, 139). This conflation between “foreigners” and poverty would recur on numerous occasions, including in 1965 when Lebanon made the sudden, simultaneous discovery of material want and the existence of foreigners. Father Semaan El Doueihi MP called for a tallying up of the total number of indigent individuals, whom he called “aliens”, describing them as, “those who steal the crust from the mouths of the Lebanese,” and as constituting a, “wellspring of filth, corruption and disease infecting every moral, human and spiritual aspect of the country’s character.” It is noteworthy that those charged with stealing a crust from the mouths of the Lebanese were also accused by the priestly MP with selling the country’s banking secrets overseas, an accusation in which the absolute conflation of poverty and “otherness” falls apart. The man accused of selling banking secrets was none other than Lebanese-Palestinian banker Yousef Beidas, the subject of a conspiracy by the ruling classes to bankrupt his bank (Waddah Sharara: 1980, footnote 730-731; Traboulsi: 1999, 131-132). Disguising class power with politics Under the heading “Who rules Lebanon?” Al Nahar newspaper convened a round table in which a number of leading public figures - including Samir Frangieh, Simon Karam, Talal Husseini, Karim Muruwa, and Assem Salam - agreed almost unanimously that the answer to the question was that “Syria” (i.e. the Syrian regime) ruled Lebanon. Karim Muruwa, former deputy secretary general of the Lebanese Communist Party dissented from this view. The former communist derided the view he once held - that Lebanon was ruled by a social class - and stated that he now believed the country to be under the control of “hidden forces” with ties abroad. He called for these forces to be exposed before people made up their minds that it was the Syrian regime which was really in control. Frangieh responded that nothing was being hidden and that Lebanon’s true ruler was well known: Syria, or the Syrian regime. Assem Salam did not argue with the assumption of Syrian dominance, but dissented in so far as he asserted that, “the most powerful force controlling Lebanon is money.” Salam’s interjection was largely ignored by his fellow participants (Al Nahar, 6/1/2001). Disguising class power with sect No sources or evidence are required to back up this assertion since it is a form of denial rooted in a powerful and undeniable cliché: that Lebanon is a sectarian country, a country of sects. There is no need to set out to prove this. Sectarianism is viewed as a bane and plague, and thus this “bane” becomes the basis of all ills, a plague from which all plagues spring. During the course of the youth movement campaign that had, “The people demand the fall of the sectarian system,” as its rallying cry, walls in the city bore the following slogan - “Why is there poverty in Lebanon? Because of the sectarian system!” - and others of the same type. Denying the existence of classes because they do not conform to a particular definition of class This denial is born of a blend of despair and denial. One of its manifestations - in the literature of the Lebanese Left - is a belief that the Lebanese class structure is “blurred” because it does not conform to the parameters of social classes in industrialized capitalist societies and fails to fall into the simplistic dualities of the bourgeois/proletariat type. At other times, this “blurring” impacts the middle classes, whose complex sectarian make-up produces its own distinct lifestyle and value systems; the interaction with sect renders class boundaries indistinct (Haddad: 1996). 2- The neoliberal paradigm in measuring income distribution A market-centered methodology The currently fashionable methodology used to study class divisions and inequality is market- centered, insofar as it uses measures of income distribution and consumption as the basis of its analysis rather than measures of production, the means