Labor and conflict in pre-war Lebanon (1970-1975) : a retrival of the political experience of factory commitees in the industrial district of Beirut

Abstract

While having played a crucial role in the development of the macro-events the whole country was involved in, workers as consciously active collective subjects have found no space in the historical writing of and on Lebanon. At the base of this remotion, the hegemony of an eminently elitist and, above all, sectarian-oriented eye in reading the Lebanese events, that has reduced the history of the country to the history of their religious communities and their (often conflicting) interactions. The following research, by reconstructing the history of Lebanese grassroots labor movements and mobilizations in the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, and by trying to recuperate the silenced voice of workers' agency and discourse, aims at actively contribute to bith fill a crucial gap in Lebanese history (putting into discussion the sectarian-based paradigms through which the latter is still narrated) and also, on a theoretical point of view, to try to move a step forward in the question of the historiographical treatment of the “subaltern subject.”