There is no need to prove the bourgeois nature of Hizbollah or the Syrian regime, as many have written on this subject before; their bourgeois nature is irrefutably proven by their economic role, and in the case of Hizbollah, by the social and economic policies that they have adopted in the past few years. Hassan Nasrallah’s famous “We will not stand behind bread”,
30or Hizbollah’s support for privatisation, its opposition to the demands of the trade union Coordinating Committee
31 and the agreement it made with the Amal Movement and the Free Patriotic Movement to stop the state electricity company workers winning their demands, are all proof of Hizbollah’s bourgeois nature. Other indicators are the extensive sums Hizbollah invests in the real estate sector, which made the Southern suburbs of Beirut (a pro-Hizbollah stronghold) one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in greater Beirut. There is no need to mention the tuition fees of Hizbollah-run schools, which have become schools for the Shia middle classes rather than the poor, or the substantial amounts of money Hizbollah amasses through its healthcare institutions such as the Great Prophet Hospital in South Beirut. All of this proves that Hizbollah is the party of the Shia middle classes and bourgeoisie, the hegemony over whom it shares with the Amal Movement, and not, as many on the nationalist and Stalinist left picture it, the party of the poor and deprived.
Owing to its capitalist nature, Hizbollah has clearly entered a phase of bureaucratic bourgeois growth, particularly since the Israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006. This is evidenced by the way its cadre and members display their wealth and the privileges they enjoy such as social, economic, educational and health services. This will naturally cause a split between this arriviste bureaucracy and the large masses that Hizbollah relies on to assert its political legitimacy during elections or popular rallies. This is sometimes shown by the latent complaints of common Hizbollah supporters, who have expressed their resentment over that flaunting of wealth, and the bullying influence that members of this bureaucratic clique often exert on other people in the neighbourhoods where they operate.
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This divergence between the class nature of Hizbollah’s supporters—and
part of its membership—and its cadre, particularly at mid and senior level, is the main contradiction that Hizbollah will face in the current and future periods. This is indicated by the fact that Hizbollah is increasingly providing a Jihadi religious cover for their policies, by building mosques, depicting their intervention in Syria as a religious duty, or through the provocative sectarian slogan “Zeynab shall not be captured twice”.
33 Hizbollah’s increased use of religious messages compared to previous years indicates the necessity for them to contain their base, through an ideological and religious discipline that is bound to become more and more necessary in a context of class crisis, on a local and regional scale. Perhaps—although we cannot be certain in this case—the latest Al-Manar affair (the Hizbollah TV station had apologised to the Bahraini government for its coverage of the revolution there, after which Hizbollah sacked the TV station’s director) can be seen as an indicator of the influence of that class crisis on the party’s bureaucratic discipline; it has shown a contradiction between the party’s political and media apparatus.
The nationalist and Stalinist left do not grasp the fact that the conditions that gave birth to revolutions in the region are the same conditions that govern the resistance to occupation and imperialism. The continuation and success of that resistance are not only dependent on the degree of enthusiasm about arms; it is also necessary to see if the arms-bearing side can escape the balance of interests that controls those arms and makes them available, and if it will escape, with its bourgeois alignment, from the ongoing implosions in the class structures of regional and Arab societies.
