“We were our only intellectual and artistic works,” wrote Waddah Charara (1942-) in July 1980 in The Comrades, a retrospective exploration of his decade of militancy (1965-70) after his very early exit from Marxism, both as organized political practice and an intellectual tradition, at the outset of the Lebanese civil and regional wars (1975). Before becoming a prolific writer, a university professor and a public intellectual, Charara the militant was the theoretical tenor of the Lebanese New Left. In that capacity he was instrumental in the founding of Socialist Lebanon (1964-70), which would later merge with the radicalized Lebanese faction of the Arab Nationalist Movement establishing The Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (1970-). The Comrades is the closest Charara has come to an autobiographical narrative. It is however much more than that. The narrative which is mostly cast in the first person plural draws on, and is weaved from, multiple discursive threads. It brings together a sociological sketch of the milieux from which the comrades came, an ethnographic account of the practices and rituals of the political organizations’ life, an analysis of the local, regional and international political conjuncture defining the era, a veiled auto-critique, as well as a depiction of the theoretical and aesthetic practices of militant self-fashioning. In unraveling these different discursive threads, my paper, which also draws on Socialist Lebanon’s writings and interviews I conducted with the organizations’ members, examines the transformation of Marxism from the ground from which political and economic criticism was voiced to the object of criticism, which is explained through sociological categories such as religious sectarian affiliation. I also show how Charara’s recourse to the sociological and ethnographic registers of analysis as well as his drawing on the language of passions and aesthetics in The Comrades, is both a polemical critique of the primacy of the political, reason and science during the years of militancy as well as symptomatic of his wider theoretical intervention at the time which highlighted the primacy of the social fabric – sectarian, regional, and familial solidarities – in understanding the unfolding events of the war. I end by considering how the complex form of the text which navigates the biographical and the sociological; the theoretical and aesthetics well as beliefs and rituals is helpful to think with to capture the layered experiences of post-colonial critics who shuttle back forth between worlds, languages, conceptual traditions and attachments.