‘There Is No Value’

Abstract

This article draws on narratives from middle-class households in Beirut to examine their disenfranchisement amid the country’s financial collapse. A common expression, “There is no value,” is often used in allusion to extreme price fluctuation that has punctuated everyday life since the end of 2019. The phrase also speaks to the undoing of a middle-class lifestyle that emerged with the pegging of the Lebanese lira to the US dollar in the 1990s. Reflecting on how value is conceptualized at the level of the everyday leads into exploring some of the complex ways in which this middle-class milieu accessed credit following Lebanon’s civil war, and how everything has changed during the current dollar shortage.