Al-Akhbar's Leftist Discourse: Another Alternative That Maintains The Same Status Quo

Abstract

This thesis develops a critical analysis of the leftist alternative discourse offered by Al- Akhbar. Al-Akhbar was launched based on the alliance between a major leftist voice in Lebanon which is the Lebanese Communist Party, and the allegedly resistance sectarian party Hizbullah. Back then, this alliance was built to challenge Hariri’s capitalism and USA’s imperialism and project in the Middle East. However, after 14 years since its launch, this newspaper, that established a leftist-parlance and championed a left leaning narrative in Lebanon and the Arab world, stopped offering an alternative to the status quo and became enlisted in the Lebanese sectarian power sharing system. As my thesis will show, the newspaper’s discourse could not echo people’s demands during the Lebanese October uprising and could not offer alternatives that transcended the current power alliances in Lebanon. It was instead supportive of Hizbullah’s resistance and the Chineseled global system as the only leftist alternative that would champion people’s rights and build their welfare state. In my thesis, I will unpack how the outlet defines people as a socio-economic category and capitalizes on the elites/poor binary to legitimize the Chinese-led camp’s alternative to the US-Israeli neoliberalism. I show that this alternative turns out to reproduce the same power structures it aims to dismantle because it focuses on identity politics and an a priori defined social agents and relationships between them, and it eliminates the heterogeneity of demands and their uniqueness.