In this paper, I examine the historical circumstances which made the emergence of Beirut’s first communist party, the Lebanese People’s Party (LPP), possible in 1924. In the limited existing historiography, the rise of the LPP is explained by the economic and social trauma of WWI; yet this telling divorces the party from both the wider global context—in particular the Russian Revolution of 1917—as well as from the social and economic shifts which took place in the region during the final decades of the nineteenth century. I ultimately present an alternative history of the rise of communism in Beirut, arguing that it was primarily a product of regional change and social unrest that extended back to the late Ottoman period. To make this argument, I focus on the life and writings of Fu’ad al-Shamali, a founder of the LPP. Born in Mount Lebanon in 1894, Fu’ad al-Shamali’s status as a labor migrant was not uncommon for a period in which one-third of the region’s peasant population emigrated. For nearly a decade after leaving Mount Lebanon for Egypt, al-Shamali worked in a tobacco factory in Alexandria where he organized strikes and eventually joined the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP). In 1924, al-Shamali returned to Beirut and helped found the LPP alongside the middle-class journalist Yusuf Yazbak. Building on the work of scholars like Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and Jens Hanssen, this paper puts the LPP’s emergence in the context of late Ottoman radical thought and popular protest. I rely largely on al-Shamali’s previously unexamined writings from the 1920s and 1930s about his role in founding the LPP, his conceptual understanding of socialism and communism, and his time spent in Russia at the Sixth Communist International Congress in 1928. I also make use of Yazbak’s reflections on the founding of the LPP. Additionally, I incorporate research from contemporary periodicals like al-Sahafi al-Ta’eh and al-Insaniyya. As a broader historical intervention, I aim to reintegrate the social history of the late-Ottoman era with the history of Mandate Lebanon and to reintroduce the history of political projects that were not primarily concerned with nationalism to this period.