The Awakening of Lebanon: The Proletariat has Taken to the Streets

Since October 17, the streets of Lebanon have been burning. It is not a new bloody civil war thrown by the various imperialist forces, nor the armed intervention of some imperialism within the territory. The Lebanese proletariat and the middle classes, in a rapid process of proletarization, have taken to the streets with unusual demonstrations and unusual calls for unity and solidarity among the various ethnic and religious groups, for their living and existence conditions, constantly threatened by the economic-political crisis in which the country is plunged, calling for widespread revolt, with a hatred of the entire bourgeois political system and its corruption.

Lebanon, being a crossroads in the Mediterranean Sea, is a home of different ethnic, religious and national groups, a holder of a glorious past, a place of constant conflict and maneuver of the different regional imperialist interests, today finds itself with an unusual reality.

The past has shown that the governments in Lebanon in modern times, due to the plurality of its population, are unstable and anchored on sectarian agreements of the different ethnic groups, and of these with imperialism in turn. This is the case of the current government, led by President Al Harari, the result of the concentration of different bourgeois political sectors, Hezbollah one of them, Christians, Sunnis, under the auspices of the international bourgeoisie.

But the economic situation of the country, with a debt among the three largest in the world (!) Equal to 152% of its GDP, with a level of unemployment that borders 37% among young people, still in the process of rebuilding after the bloody civil war, it is precisely the heavy stone that has to carry on the back of the young Lebanese proletariat. The Lebanese government, in constant fiscal deficit, resorts to the usurers of global capitalism, and these in turn ask for guarantees for their “help”. This supposed help for the “benefit of the country”. which is in the interest of a bourgeoisie fully adhered to the game of capitalist chess, is opposed to improvements in the living conditions of the proletariat, and is about them that cut measures are directed “for the good of the country”.

The austerity measures, directed by the Government, such as the cut in pensions, cuts in the salaries of public employees, and the last one, that sparked the present crisis, a tax on the use of the WhatsApp application of 6 dollars monthly, due to a drop in the collection of national teleoperators companies, have driven the proletarians and the middle classes to revolt. In a country where the majority of the working class does not earn more than 300 dollars per month, and unemployment among the youngest is so great, the explosion was only a matter of times and moments.

Capitalism at the global level is showing the beginning of a new great economic crisis of global magnitude, the bourgeois desperately tries to save its profit rate, trying to increase the percentage of benefits that constantly fall, through different methods of cuts in the living and working conditions of the proletarian, of the worker class, the producing class of the surplus value.

A series of manifestations around the globe appear in reaction to the austerity methods, to improvements in living and working conditions, showing a tendency towards the awakening of the proletarian class, which does not distinguish between nations, race, religion, but the division between the classes within society. Ecuador, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, now Lebanon.

In the case of the Middle East, the former unit of Arab capitalism, Pan-Arabism, today shows itself as a forgotten scam of the past, which is giving way to the real and unique progressive struggle: that of classes, that of the conditions of living and work, at first revendicative, and then in the future political-revolutionary.

It is from this point of view, admirable as in a country that lived an extreme civil war, fueled by the tactics of division of the bourgeoisie into groups of sectarian unity, today show such unity of action around the defense of their common economic interests. Palestinian Arabs, Christian Arabs, and Muslim Arabs, among others, around the same demands and side by side. This certainly in a small country like Lebanon, is a great step forward.

The reorganization of the working class around class unions, and the intervention of the World Party in this direction, is the most important work today, in light of recent events, for the workers and communists of the world. This process will be a long and hard process, like as has been the reconstitution of the destroyed World Communist Party, today in the International Communist Party.

Today here, in the same place and in the same historical class line, the International Communist Party, faithful to Marxist principles after decades of counterrevolution, and on the eve of the great global economic crisis, is ready to lead the revolution of tomorrow, towards our final goal, the species plan, full Communism.