Nizar Hassan

Since the end of its civil war, Lebanon has been ruled by a political elite that maintains a sectarian clientelist hegemony characterised by corruption and public services deterioration. The 2015 protest movement (Harak) was provoked by a waste-management crisis but soon evolved to challenge the totality of this order. This research was motivated by the movement’s failure to impose immediate compromise on the elite. Going beyond the reactionary role of the ruling elite, this analysis focuses on the structural aspects impeding protest movements. Linking Piven’s concepts of disruption and interdependence (2006) to Wright’s understanding of structural power (2000), it investigates how the class composition of the Harak’s leadership impacted the disruptive capacities and therefore limited the potential of the movement. It begins by exploring how the context of post-war neoliberal transformation has weakened the forces of organised labour, which explains the relative absence of working-class representatives from the Harak’s leadership. Based on semi-structured interviews and recent literature, it then analyses the ensuing dominance of ‘middle-class’ actors over the movement, focusing on implications for priorities, dynamics, strategies and disruptive  capacities. By examining the impact of capitalism’s transformation on working class power (chapter 3) and the limited disruptive power of middle-class activism (chapter 4), this study joins the recent academic call for ‘bringing back capitalism’ (Della Porta, 2015) into the analysis of social movements, linking class and the economy to the potential and limitations of protest.