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the PLO, they are vague on the Lebanese Left. Andrew Hornung spoke to MAGIDA SALMAN, a Lebanese revolutionary now living in London What is the make-up of the alliance usually referred to as the Lebanese Left?

The so-called left is very heterogenous. Often the left includes forces that cannot really be termed leftist at all. what is called the Lebanese Left is an amalgam of nationalist forces: some purely confessional forces allied to some working class trends. And by working class trends I mean really the Lebanese CP. Historically, if we want to talk about a working class movement in Lebanon we can only talk about the LCP.

How did this working movement emerge?

This movement was created among the Christian working class at the beginning, because at the beginning of the century the places that were trying to industrialise were in the Christian community.

The CP organised the first trade union movement in Lebanon. Later on, with the development of the service sector and the imporerishment of the South, a lot of people - mainly Shia Muslims who had been very poor peasants or agricultural workers in the tobacco plantations — emigrated to the towns and constituted a new element in the small Lebanese working class.

The CP began to develop in this milieu too. It is Masses mourn the death of Nasser issues of these times, they did keep their working class base.

There is also the Independent Nasserite Movement and its armed wing elsewhere was in crisis. On the one hand there were Nasserites who were firmly wedded to the Egyptian state and on the other hand more independent in Beirut.

Then there Ba'athists.

What distingui the are shes Ba'athists from the Nasserites ideologically?

Nothing really. The Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athists back certain individuals who have no real base other than the weight of these regimes. There are only one or two MPs and of course a few people around them, but basically they are only as strong as the nonLebanese regimes they represent.

Is the Syrian Social Nation: alist Party backed by Syrie too?

No. Originally the Syrian Nationalist Party . - a Lebanese Party that calls for a Greater Syria - was ideologically very fascistic. It contained a lot of classical anti-semitism, is organisationally very hierarchic.

It appeared in the 1930s in Lebanon, based originally in the Christian mountain areas. It played on the theme of the national unity of Christians and Muslims, anti-confessionalism and the building of a Greater Syria which would be a great nation based on an entente between workers and employers.

It was not an agent of Syria. With the boom of the 1960s, the influx of Arab money into Lebanon, and various external radicalising influences like vietnam and the Palestinian question the SNP went through many splits.

One of the splinters, one led by In'am Ra'ad, made at least a verbal turn towards a kind of Third WorldIsm, taking up now and again Marxist terminology too. This is the SSNP.

The Progressive Socialist Party is often described as if it were the lynch-pin of the Lebanese National Movement. What sort of a party is it, and has it changed since the assassination of its leader, Kemal Jumblatt?

In a way it isn't a party at all. It doesn't have a properly organised base in the sense of a modern political party - that is one way in which the Phalangists, for instance, are different from the Muslim parties and even from some of the Christian groups: the Phalangists are a proper political party, with a well organised apparatus and a functioning base.

The PSP is really a collection of MPs elected by the Druze community, a community which, despite the socialist leanings oi the Party, is itself deeply traditional. The PSP is not a party based around a programme, but built around a man, Kemal Jumblatt.

Since Jumblatt's death things have not changed except that his son Walid does not have the prestige that his father had. His father was, after all, a very important figure not only on a Lebanese but on an Arab level.

You said at the beginning that this Lebanese Nationalist Movement cannot be called truly leftist. Is this because a number of the elements of it that you have described are not of the Left or is it because the orientation of the Movement itself has not been a leftist one?

Both really. The fact is that the Lebanese National Movement has often fallen into confessionalism.

Also, despite the leftist and working class approach of some elements within the LNM, the Movement has not actively fought for class demands, not even on the question of education.

There has been a real absence of any programme to alter social conditions: everythng has been focussed on restructuring the state, and that means in the present context altering the confessional division not really overcoming confessionalism and the social and economic backwardness of which it is in large part a product.

The Leftists in the Movement have basically "liquidated into this conception and into a general current of populist phraseology.

The CP, which once had a record of fighting for working class demands, has largely dropped the working class elements in its programme and this nationalist tendency and deepened the confessional divisions.

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drawn closer to the Syrians. The war has only increased