Historical Materialism and the Petty Bourgeois Nationalist: On Yanis Iqbal’s The Sword and the Neck

May 14, 2026

Tibor Szamuely

Today, much of the radical left considers a defense, however qualified, of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and of the political line of the organizations which carried it out, as a kind of litmus test separating the authentic advocates of a nebulously defined “resistance” from state-compatible careerists grouped under the shameful banner of controlled opposition. In societies where, due to a complex of historical contingencies, reason of state has become practically synonymous with Zionist reason, this has a certain empirical logic which has nothing to do with the disingenuous accusations of “antisemitism” emanating from the paid mouthpieces of a barbaric racist regime. However, as Marx observed, in a world where appearance corresponded with essence there would be no need for science. And even more to the point, it was Lenin who reminded us that:

People always have been and they always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics, until they learn behind every kind of moral, religious, political, social phrase, declaration and promise to seek out the interests of this or that class or classes.

Therefore, it behooves us as scientific socialists to seek out what “interests” stand behind moral and political “phrases” about “oppression”, “resistance”, and “liberation”. This applies to the national question in Palestine just as it applies to every political question. Yanis Iqbal’s essay collection essay collection, as an apologia of the operation, written from the standpoint of a self proclaimed Marxist, gives us a chance to carry out this search.

I

Iqbal sets the stage by describing South Africa’s genocide case filed against Israel at the ICJ. According to Iqbal, the juxtaposition of the legal discourse of the South African state and the rhetoric of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs illuminates a “political divide” which he characterizes as the “metaphysics of dominant narratives versus the physics of the oppressed”. It is telling that Iqbal, despite his signature insistence on historical materialism, begins by articulating a political divide in ahistorical and non-class terms. What class do the South African attorneys represent? What class does the Israeli MFA represent? If we were to rely on Iqbal’s opening framing we would have no idea. The abstract retreat from the historical and concrete is only compounded by his description of the Palestinian people as “a group experiencing intense subjection to a systematically organized drive for control and power”. A description so broad as to characterize everyone who occupies a subordinate position in class-divided societies.

We can begin our search here at the beginning of Iqbal’s text by attempting to illuminate the omissions of its opening formulation. Both South Africa and Israel as states represent the same class; the bourgeoisie, a class which grounds its domination in the extraction of surplus from free wage labor via the ownership of private property. And the Palestinian people, far from being simply a “group”, are a nation. And a nation is a community constituted on the base of the relations of production which characterize bourgeois dominance. The nation is by default under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, from the first page of his text, Iqbal ignores what is most essential about the historical drama he sets to analyze. All actors in the struggle, not only Israel or the West but the Palestinian national movement and South Africa likewise, are sociologically and politically bourgeois.

We will, thanks to a detour through Losurdo, soon understand why Iqbal, rather than foregrounding this fact as a starting point, conceals it beneath misleading generalities. According to Iqbal, although “...the exchange of commodities on the capitalist market creates the possibility of equality since the labour of one person can be exchanged for that of another person”, this in no way “conclusively institutes equality”. On the contrary, “capitalist market exchange only created the possibility of thinking equality”. And taking his bearings from Losurdo, Iqbal defines bourgeois politics in general, under the moniker of “liberalism”, as the opposition to this “conclusive institution of equality”.

Here we begin to see the logic of his opening omissions. Viewed through the lens of Losurdo’s theory of liberalism, Zionism is an archetypically liberal movement, (and for Losurdo there is essentially a sign of equality between liberalism and the bourgeoisie tout court) a liberal movement which is grounded in the denial of any universalization of the formal equality premised in the potential of commodity production. On the other hand, the post-colonial, multiracial, and democratic South Africa, and the Palestinian national movement, appear as equally archetypical avatars of anti-liberal emancipation, which can only be anti-bourgeois.

However, there are two problems here. First of all, to perpetrate a rhetorical slight of hand which takes universal equality as premise and potential of the capitalist mode of production and reduces it to universal equality as premise and potential of commodity production per se is to qualitatively underestimate the structurally constitutive relation between capitalist production and the actualization of universal formal equality. Commodity production can develop to a high point in societies whose mode of production excludes universal formal equality. Roman law exemplifies this. Commodity production can also continue in societies where the process of displacement of abstract formal-universal by concrete material equality has already begun. However, the relation between universal formal equality and specifically capitalist commodity production is much deeper. Capitalist production requires the formal freedom of the wage laborer as its precondition. Everywhere this relation began to take root, even amidst colonial bondage, it was inseparable from a new form of freedom; the form of freedom which made the modern working class movement possible.

The tendential universalization of this freedom is the necessary form of appearance in the political and ideological superstructure of the predominance of free wage labor in the economic base. Its full actualization is not anti-bourgeois or a movement beyond the limits of liberalism but the fullest flourishing of the same. The truth of this observation is already contained in Iqbal’s opening remarks. A bourgeois state like South Africa, where capital exercises unchecked dictatorship choose, on account of whatever political calculation, to use an international forum constructed by imperialism, to assert liberal norms against Israel, an illiberal state which has become a global poster child for the violation of these norms. If the barbaric actuality of bourgeois society repetitively falls short of its civilized potential, even the full actualization of the latter only exposes the anarchic atomism and law of the jungle which is the real essence of universal formal equality. Democratic South Africa is living proof.

For Iqbal, a bourgeois democrat like Fanon is a critic of the limitations of bourgeois freedom, when in fact it was the FLN who brought bourgeois freedom to Algeria. When the advocacy of bourgeois freedom is simplistically identified with its overcoming, the democratic with the socialist revolution, proletarian politics becomes illegible and unimaginable. Thus, for Iqbal, the lessons of the struggle in South Africa stop only with some observations that the international bourgeoisie found the racist regime there preferable to a communist takeover. That, faced with the same threat, imperialism assisted in the dismantling of the Apartheid system, and that, now, the refined and civilized slavery of free wage laborers in South Africa is continued under the banner of the politics he promotes, is left unmentioned.

In Iqbal’s Losurdo derived haste to paint iliberalism as liberalism actualized and the realization of liberalism as its abolition, he stoops to painting the Apartheid regime and Zionism as paradigmatic exemplars of liberal order. We can see all too clearly the endpoint of this logic, itself a product of decades of dilution of the scientific Marxist program. If the problem of our age is the denial of universal formal equality by exceptionally barbaric regimes of racial subordination and extermination, then the solution is the real implementation of the same. Losurdo is an apologist of bourgeois dictatorship of the same stamp as Rawls or Habermas.

As the conclusion of his first essay, Iqbal cites Cabral:

At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades.

According to Iqbal, the above is an “anti-colonial” definition of freedom. That is incorrect. Cabral, as a leader of a national revolutionary movement who, unlike many in the ANC, (not to mention Hamas) authentically sought to wage the democratic revolution as the first stage of the socialist revolution, was offering an anti-capitalist definition of freedom. What the Iqbals of the world don’t understand is that, while the overlap of the two defined the 20th century and may even find its echo today, they will never and can never be the same thing. In fact, they represent two contradictory principles of two different classes. In the final accounting, the triumph of the one means the destruction of the other, even if at a given moment they appear to be marching hand in hand.

II

Iqbal begins his next contribution by contrasting “abstract internationalism” (bizarrely attributed to post-colonialism) with the “concrete politics of national liberation”. This is the usual bourgeois insistence that the shared experience of the working class as wage-dependent laborers is an “abstraction”, while the struggle of exploiters over their fair share of profit (the entire content of national liberation movements absent the international horizon of the working class) is “concrete”.

He proceeds to inform the reader that Marxism has three historical reference points:

1) actually existing socialist states; 2) wars of national liberation; and 3) organized workers’ movement.

God only knows from what revisionist textbook he has extracted this litany, but it is self-evidently wrong. Marxism has one historical reference point and one alone, the international workers’ movement. Socialist states are a product and element of this movement, and wars of national liberation have been significant to Marxism insofar as they have been a means for this movement to take power. Marxism represents the interests of one class and one class only, a class which is inherently international. But it gets better!

We are informed that “Iraq, Syria and Egypt” were among the “actually existing socialist states”, although with the caveat cribbed from Ali Kadri that:

Arab socialism was in retrospect capitalism held in suspension by Soviet support and also because it did not sufficiently bond together the national front in anti-imperialist struggle.

Iqbal further adds that, in these “socialist” states, the “centrality of workers’ control in the labor process” was not “realized”. First of all, to not only characterize Iraq, Syria and Egypt as “socialist” (even the craven opportunists of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany were only comfortable with claiming their “socialist orientation”) but to exclude the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the one state in the Arab world actually produced by a socialist revolution, is rather strange. Secondly, we can only marvel at the wisdom of Kadri, who not only considers socialism to be “capitalism in suspension” but finds the remedy for this limitation in even more class collaboration (the alleged need to “sufficiently bond together the national front in anti-imperialist struggle”).

Suffice to say, if Syria and Iraq were examples of “actually existing socialism”, it seems likely that Israel at the time, with its substantial state sector and kibbutz communes, not to mention significant albeit brief Soviet support, was as well. Iqbal type “Marxists” would of course object to this, citing Zionist racism, with the unspoken premise that the Arab racism and sectarianism of the Syrian and Iraqi regimes is, for reasons likely known only to them, a different matter. Much more importantly, the minimum precondition of socialism is a system of property relations, which was never introduced in the above states (as is admitted here with a reference to “small capital holders”).

The unspoken premise of the strange ethnic favoritism indulged in by so many nominally Marxist commentators on the Middle East is that referring to Jewish ethnic nationalism as a “liberation movement” is downright criminal, while equally ethnic Arab nationalists, who found their own “Palestinians” among the Kurds or other groups, must be identified as such. Justification for this distinction is rarely provided and is hardly likely to be credible in any case. The fact the USSR provided military and economic support to these states is no more proof of their progressive character than the treaty of Rapallo or German concessions show the same of the Weimar Republic.

At this point, Iqbal is driven to criticize post-colonialism with the only tools he has, those of Zhdanov’s campaign against cosmopolitanism. We are informed that post-colonialism is anti-Marxist, because it is “driven by a rejection of all forms of nationalism”. The operative polarity is not between international imperialism and the international proletariat (too “abstract” of a dichotomy for Iqbal’s taste…) but between US imperialism and the frustrated nationalist aspiration of the subaltern bourgeoisie in peripheral centers of accumulation. This is the way the Iqbal type “Marxist” bridges the substantial gap between Lenin and Hafaz Assad.

In the course of his criticism of Edward Said, we learn that the Leninist theory of imperialism is a closed book for him. According to Iqbal:

Typically, colonialism is believed to have preceded imperialism, involving a process of private enterprises and holding companies spanning from the 15th to the 19th century. During this period, resource extraction, labor exploitation and settler-colonialism were facilitated through bureaucracies, local elites, and occupying armies. Imperialism developed in the late 19th century as an indirect form of international domination, pursued through trade agreements, sanctions, and austerity packages.

Here, imperialism as a stage of world capitalism, characterized by monopoly, dominance of finance capital, and capital export—the definition of imperialism that forms the starting point of the entire Marxist discussion of the subject—is not even mentioned. Iqbal casually confuses it with neocolonialism. Such sloppiness is indicative of the opportunism at work. Our author is not making a good faith effort to understand objective reality. He is simply assembling an intellectual mishmash suited to confirm his empirical impressions and emotional prejudices. We are in the realm, not of the concept, but opinion.

At this point, Iqbal reiterates with approval the strategic concept of the PFLP, premised upon the framework of an “Arab Hanoi” as a base for resistance against Israel. If we start from the Marxist lens of property relations, outside of perhaps Aden, there was no “Arab Hanoi”. The constitution of any “Arab Hanoi” had to start from workers’ revolutions in Algiers, Damascus and Baghdad. This is precisely the obvious conclusion that the petty bourgeois opportunists of the PFLP avoided like the plague in favor of becoming pawns of Arab bourgeois Bonapartism. This is unsurprising, because, as nationalists, for them, the interests of the international working class were subordinated to the Arab and Palestinian cause, not the reverse. Arab-Jewish ethnic warfare took precedence over the formulation of a strategy for international proletarian revolution in the Middle East. This is the sordid legacy that Iqbal wants us to uphold.

In conclusion, Iqbal is hopeful that Chinese monopoly capital will see fit to employ Palestinian nationalists as mercenaries in its struggle to redivide the world amidst an ever more decadent and senile US imperialism. A journey of bourgeois ethnic racketing from Saddam Hussain to Huawei. The possibility of mass action by the multinational working class of the Middle East doesn’t even exist in this analysis. For Iqbal, history is not first of all that of class struggle, but of geopolitics. The reversal of the relation of priority between the two, out of opportunistic fear of the frontal clash with imperialism, has always been the hallmark of Stalinist opportunism and compromise, from the Popular Front, to Yalta, to the Theory of Three Worlds.

III

Iqbal makes this trivialization of class struggle philosophically explicit when he states:

As an apparatus, mechanism, and process, class struggle is the laboratory in which different instances of the social totality come together to experimentally produce something new.

On the contrary, class struggle is the entire substance of the social totality. There are no “instances” prior to class struggle. There is only the decomposition of the proletariat under the dictatorship of the bourgeois and the cohesion and re-cohesion of the proletariat against this pressure, leading to the imposition of the workers' dictatorship and the forceful destructuration of the bourgeoisie in turn. This is the exclusive content of history and thought in societies defined by the capitalist mode of production.

According to Iqbal, drawing on Sotiris’s reading of Althusser against the provocations of Žižek:

Capitalist society here is regarded as a social formation of conflicting, differential, and multilayered forces constantly in flux. The structure of society is immanent within that uneven balance of forces, rather than transcendent on them, even if that transcendence is one of chaotic negativity. Non-contemporaneity disrupts any philosophical attempt to monopolize the truth of politics. Any such truth is a provisional product of the class struggle.

Here we find the addiction to nuance and qualification which forms the hallmark of the opportunist seeking to squirm his way out of the bipolarity and monolithic totality encoded in the economic structure itself. Truth is not the singular, absolute, and inescapable material reality which brooks no argument but a “provisional product”. This is the philosophy of the compromiser whose thought is not that of a rising class imposing its will but a weasel worded attorney seeking to evade the obligations of history.

At this, Iqbal seeks authority for the political practice of Hamas in the work of Lenin on proletarian organization declaring:

At the transindividual level, anti-colonial violence functions as a positive project, which Lenin labeled as the “school of life and struggle”.

The organization of the proletariat within the capitalist production process is equated to the organization of a bourgeois party promoting nationalist and clerical politics for which Lenin would have had nothing but contempt. If we are to seek the historical ancestors of Hamas, there is no doubt we would find them among the Basmachi, not the Bolsheviks. This is a fact with which any educated and sensible Hamas member would automatically agree. It is only deviant communists, intellectually bankrupted by opportunism, who would argue otherwise.

Finally, after almost one hundred pages of meanderings, we reach an appropriate climax in the form of Iqbal’s attempt to whitewash the October 7^th massacre. We are informed, against the backdrop of an attempted refutation of the inane musings of the Eurocrat hack Etienne Balibar, that:

Essentially, all of the supposed atrocities committed by Hamas have been debunked.

We are compelled to note here that if Iqbal’s argument was sound there would be no need for the qualifier “essentially”. If the outrageous claims of the Zionist lie-machine about babies in ovens and so on are obviously unreal, it remains equally indisputable that Hamas and its co-belligerants were responsible for the indiscriminate killing and detention of a large number of people simply on the grounds of their presence on Israeli territory at the time of the operation. Despite Iqbal’s claims, this is in no way “impossible to judge”. And this indiscriminate killing has a “proud” history in the tradition of the Palestinian national movement, including its most extreme left wing. We need only cite Lod Airport and Ma'alot.

As communists we are not pacifists, nor do we consider the Geneva Convention a sacrosanct document. We have other criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of acts of violence. First of all does a given military operation, as the instrument of a given political line, serve to unify and consolidate the proletariat as a political subject with its own class program, separate from all bourgeois programs, or does it, on the contrary, further decompose the proletariat into mutually antagonistic elements subject in common to a strengthened bourgeois dictate?

It is all too clear that the history of indiscriminate operations by the Palestinian resistance against Israeli civilians has not only facilitated the latter by further reinforcing the wedge driven between Arab and Jewish workers by Zionist and Arab nationalist reaction, but has been aimed at that objective. If we can and must approve of armed resistance against ethnic cleansing, this in no way equates to an apologia of the reactionary forces organizing such resistance. Anti-Zionists often equate the Palestinian resistance in Gaza to the Jewish resistance in Warsaw. Taking such a comparison to heart, it is good to recall that the participation of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists in the resistance to National Socialism did not alter their own viciously reactionary character by one iota. Indeed, if Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto of the 21^st century, then Yahaya Sinwar is its Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

What that says about alleged “Marxists” like Iqbal who perform conceptual acrobatics to paint such a figure in the rosiest possible hues we leave to the judgment of the reader.