I’ve been in the United States for almost six years now. I’ve spent most of it in New York City and Washington, DC. Living here after growing up witnessing the slow-motion collapse of Lebanon, gave me a very specific kind of peripheral vision. I see the gears of the system grinding everywhere, and what scares me is that capitalism has become so dominant that we literally cannot imagine an alternative. That’s exactly the premise of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. This week’s newsletter is gonna be delving into some of his ideas and how I witnessed or experienced them in my new life, and the old one. The “Entrepreneurs” and The 7arboo2s A big part of my career has been fighting against the Free Patriotic Movement, the “Aounists.” After a brief moment in my teenage years when I was mesmerized by their “progressive” orange plan in the 2005 elections, I quickly got disenchanted when Michel Aoun sold his soul to Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in 2006, right after the first elections following the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, five years after Israel’s occupation. Many in the anti-Syrian occupation camp allied themselves with Hezbollah and other Syrian occupation collaborators. As someone who went down to protest on March 14, 2005 with my family, and even my beloved late dog Titan, it felt like a betrayal. Only days before, Hezbollah and other Syrian assets had staged their own protest to “thank” the Assad regime for 29 years of brutal, humiliating occupation, rivaled only by Israel’s. The Aounists were the only ones who hadn’t allied themselves with Hezbollah, and I was excited about them. I was born after Michel Aoun ran away to France and abandoned his supporters and family, who were subsequently crushed by the Assad regime, so I didn’t know enough about the man’s failures and damage. To me, he was just the only one who seemed not to have betrayed what had motivated an entire people on March 14, 2005, when enough pressure was built to eject the foreign army whose checkpoint I had to pass every Sunday on the way to my hometown in Ehden. On February 6, 2006, the Mar Mikhail “Maronite wedding” between Aoun and Nasrallah took place, not even a year after the election in which Aoun had run against the so-called elite sectarian parties aligned with Hezbollah. Those elites, mind-bogglingly, included Saad Hariri, whose father had been assassinated by Hezbollah and Assad months before he capitulated to Hezbollah and effectively anointed them the successor to the security state the Syrian occupation had left behind. That assassination was the moment the regime had clearly crossed a line and pushed so many of us into the streets. Not out of personal devotion to Hariri, but because a car bomb cannot be the way our lives are governed. Enough. That betrayal by what was called March 14, followed by the betrayal of the FPM, cemented my political beliefs. I realized none of what was on offer represented me, not even remotely, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. Looking back, these were all small steps on the road to October 17, 2019. But I digress. When the FPM got into power on Hezbollah’s back, they proved to be just as bad, if not worse, than the rest. It became painfully clear how blatantly corrupt, incompetent, and most importantly, cruel they were. One of my relatives, whom I am no longer in contact with, remained a die-hard Aounist. Even when I was being illegally detained, she still supported the disgraced and reviled Gebran Bassil. In one heated conversation, she let the mask slip, and I finally understood the mindset behind supporting someone who had demonstrably made all our lives worse. She said something along the lines of, “Berri and Junblat and Hariri have been stealing for decades. Now it’s our turn.” That statement was problematic on so many levels. The most obvious was the sectarian angle. Christians in Lebanon were largely left out of the post–Civil War spoils. After being the pre-war elites, the resentment never really subsided. You can see it in the obsession with Bashir Gemayel to this day, the “if only” refrain that many right-wing Christians use to explain why the country is helpless and unreformable because of one assassination among so many. To her, the naked corruption of the Aounists was payback, or at least finally getting a piece of the cake after years of operating in the shadows of the Syrian occupation and its local collaborators. Electricity was coming on for fewer hours. The country was collapsing. Yet she was happy that Gebran Bassil could buy tailored suits and shoes with lifted soles, even as her life savings vanished. It’s a zero-sum mindset I keep seeing in both Lebanon and the United States: when a once-privileged group feels that a once-oppressed group doing better is a threat to them, instead of something that could make society better for everyone. Then the word “7arboo2” (حربوق) popped into my head and started flashing. It’s a Levantine Arabic term used in Lebanon and Syria to describe someone exceptionally clever, sharp-witted, and street-smart. It often carries the sense of someone mischievous or sneaky, always one step ahead, blending intelligence with a sly edge. Looking back, it connects closely to the “Ma T3isha” idea I wrote about last year. A problematic idea in our society, where the slyness and shamelessness of ripping people off is framed as a positive trait, even an admirable one. That’s when you realize how deeply naked, unchecked capitalism dominates our psyches, to the point that someone who can extract capital from a captive population and then flaunt the wealth hoarded from other people’s labor is seen as aspirational. It’s not that different from the United States’ obsession with billionaires who spend fortunes building bunkers for an apocalypse they believe is coming, instead of using even a fraction of that wealth to address the very conditions that make them feel the need for private islands and underground shelters when late-stage capitalism finally buckles. That relative couldn’t even imagine a world where Bassil might have actually done something in the public interest instead of building his entire identity around “protecting the sect’s rights,” when in reality it was only his offshore bank accounts getting protection. Meanwhile, his tayfeh declined even further under his father-in-law’s presidency, just like every other tayfeh, except for the tiny circle of elites from each sect who continued to thrive. It was the worst blend of capitalism and feudalism, the za3ims and their peasants, repackaged as “sect survival” while the country hollowed out around them. Seen through Mark Fisher’s lens, what we were living was not just corruption or sectarianism, but a failure of imagination carefully cultivated over decades. Capitalist realism shrinks the political horizon until extraction feels inevitable. The “7arboo2” becomes aspirational, the za3im becomes unavoidable, and the idea of public good starts to sound like a children’s fantasy. When people say “at least it’s our turn,” they are not defending obvious theft as much as admitting they cannot picture a system that doesn’t revolve around it. Even after decades of blaming Israel and Syria as the reason nothing works and why we “can’t have nice things,” the Aounists and the rest of the sectarian elite never dared to deviate from that exploitative occupier mindset. They kept it exactly the same, just without the occupation excuse to soften the blow anymore. That is the real damage. Not just our stolen money or crumbled institutions, but a collective surrender to the idea that this is the only way things can function. And once that belief settled in, decline stopped feeling like a policy choice that can change, but instead like a fate we’re all doomed to. Conclusion But if capitalist realism is a failure of imagination, then resistance has to begin there too. Mark Fisher didn’t argue that capitalism is literally unbeatable. He argued that it convinces us it is. The spell works by narrowing what feels possible. So breaking it does not start with some grand utopian blueprint. It starts with rejecting the zero-sum lie. Rejecting the idea that politics is just organized theft. Rejecting the idea that public good is childish. In Lebanon, that means refusing to see the state as a carcass to be divided among tayfehs, and instead as something that can actually function for everyone. It means building and supporting networks that already operate outside the za3im logic: mutual aid, independent unions, civic coalitions, cross-sectarian movements like October 17 that briefly cracked the illusion and showed people they were not alone. It means insisting that electricity, water, banking, justice are not sectarian spoils but baseline rights. In New York City, and across the United States, it means refusing the billionaire bunker fantasy. It means pushing back against the idea that housing, healthcare, and education are luxuries in the richest city in the world. It means organizing tenants, strengthening labor, supporting public institutions, and making solidarity feel more practical than hoarding. The same imagination that tells a Lebanese voter “at least it’s our turn” tells an American worker “that’s just how the market works.” Both can be unlearned. Fisher wrote about “cracks” in capitalist realism, moments when the inevitability flickers and something else becomes thinkable. We’ve seen those cracks. In the streets of Beirut in 2019. In union drives across the US. In communities that choose cooperation over competition, even when the system rewards the opposite. During Zohran Mamdani’s historic campaign, defeating the Republicans, Democratic establishment, the billionaires and zionists, by listening to people, then talking to them honestly and working with them on creating a
