A response to McManus’ defense of “liberal socialism” must begin with imperialism because it is the terrain on which the very philosophical issues he foregrounds—humanism, Marx interpretation, essentialism—acquire their intelligibility.

(1) McManus’ response misconstrues the substance of my critique by treating it as an accusation of “insufficient attention” to imperialism. What my article examined, however, was the manner in which imperialism is granted visibility yet conceptually minimized. His texts repeatedly concede the dependence of Northern welfare states on “super-exploitation of the developing world,” their “fragility and insufficiency,” and their vulnerability to reversal once global conditions shifted. These admissions already establish that the social-democratic achievements he valorizes were predicated on coercive global hierarchies. A genuinely materialist method would incorporate these determinations into the conceptual structure of the theory itself. Yet McManus proceeds to present these same welfare states as “chiefly responsible for constructing the freest and most prosperous societies the world has yet seen,” a formulation that elevates them into normative exemplars despite the very conditions he has identified as foundational. The dependence on imperial extraction is transformed from a constitutive condition into an incidental distortion. This is the mechanism of conceptual neutralization that my critique named.

The pattern becomes even clearer when one examines the Hegelian vocabulary McManus employs to recast structural limits as developmental friction. His insistence that “a sufficient quantity of major reforms could lead over time to a qualitative transformation” functions to re-describe the reversibility of welfarist gains as temporary interruption within a cumulative process of moral advancement. The Hegelian lesson—“sufficiently granular transitions can aggregate” into a new social form—permits him to absorb the contradictions of global capitalism into a narrative of gradual realization of human capacities.

In his reply to my article, McManus gestures toward his own criticisms of earlier liberal socialists who ignored empire. This is beside the point. The critique addressed how his own theory relocates imperialism to the status of a merely empirical fact, external to the normative and developmental content of liberal socialism. The distinction between mentioning something and integrating it into one’s conceptual framework is crucial: McManus does the former, not the latter.

This displacement becomes explicit in his remark that the debate over the dependence of Nordic social democracy on imperialist structures is “historical and empirical rather than conceptual,” and therefore “less foundational than originally intended.” This admission inadvertently reaffirms the core argument of my article: what is conceded empirically is erased conceptually. The Patnaikian analysis I drew upon makes clear that the Nordic “golden age” was inseparable from global mechanisms—Third World land-augmentation, postcolonial export competition, and the disciplining presence of the USSR—that stabilized prices, suppressed inflationary pressures, and enabled the wage/productivity nexus that underwrote welfarist prosperity. When McManus designates them as merely empirical, he reproduces the abstraction I analyzed: the elevation of moral-cum-humanist categories (flourishing, capability development, gradual reform) over structural determinants (imperial extraction, uneven development, global monetary dynamics) that actually shape political possibility. The conceptual/empirical distinction he relies upon is itself produced by the Hegelian-humanist framework: what aligns with the moral telos appears foundational, while what reveals its fragility is consigned to historical contingency.

This trivialization of imperialism becomes even more explicit in McManus’ comment that my critique “overstates” the implications of Nordic dependence on imperialist structures because “all contemporary production is carried out under capitalism,” and because figures like Olof Palme were “far more militant in opposing imperialism and colonialism than most other world leaders.” Imperialism appears as a universal condition of present-day production, a diffuse and unavoidable backdrop that affects “all” societies alike. Once framed in this way, imperialism sheds any differential or strategic weight: it no longer accounts for why some formations (e.g. Nordic welfare states) could sustain historically high levels of social protection while others (e.g. postcolonial economies) absorbed the pressures of global price stabilization and coercive adjustment. Presented as an unavoidable feature of the global landscape, imperialism becomes something to be accepted rather than a structure demanding immediate action.

His invocation of Palme’s personal opposition is beside the point. The issue is not whether particular Nordic leaders espoused anti-imperialist values, but whether the welfare-state model they governed presupposed global hierarchies that no degree of individual opposition could alter as long as the model itself remained a welfare-state formation.

(2) The philosophical component of my critique therefore follows directly. Once a political ontology is anchored in a normative anthropology—human beings conceived as bearers of intrinsic capacities whose development furnishes the measure of political life—historical antagonisms lose their constitutive status. They appear as deviations from an intelligible essence. This is the essentialism I analyzed. In The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, McManus affirms that the “well-being of concrete individuals should be the ultimate end of society,” that institutions must “facilitate the development of human powers or capacities,” and that this orientation has an “Aristotelian ring.” These statements disclose a political ontology in which a substantive conception of flourishing is posited prior to and independently of the contradictions through which political subjects are formed.

McManus attempts to evade this by redefining essentialism so that it refers only to pre-modern metaphysics of hierarchical complementarity and organicism. He assures the reader that he rejects Aristotelian teleology, praises Hobbes for undermining final causes, and concludes that he is therefore innocent of essentialism. This redefinition does not touch the argument. The essentialism under critique is not the pre-modern “ontological chain of being” but the installation of a normative anthropology of capacities and flourishing as the horizon of political judgment. Ray Brassier’s reconstruction of Marx’s materialism, which I cited in my article, explains why this is conceptually untenable. Brassier shows that Marx’s appeals to “human powers” and “free conscious activity” cannot be understood as references to an essence whose latent potential awaits realization. If genus-being is flattened onto actual social relations, then nothing remains latent; if it exceeds them, then an a-historical essence has been smuggled back in. The only way out is to recognize that potentiality is produced through estrangement, not anterior to it. As Brassier writes, “potentiality is determined ex post, not ex ante.” Human capacities do not preexist history; they are constituted through the very forms of alienation that make them intelligible. A political theory that treats the development of intrinsic powers as its normative horizon necessarily forecloses this dialectical insight. It renders politics an instrument of actualization, not a terrain in which new forms of subjectivity and freedom emerge through antagonism.

This conceptual structure appears with particular clarity in McManus’ commentary on war. His 2023 essay on Gaza is an example of the wider moral dilemmas of “war” and exemplifies how a political ontology grounded in the realization of intrinsic human capacities renders political antagonism unintelligible. McManus begins by encouraging readers to resist “the urge to know who is in the right and who in the wrong,” insisting that “picking sides makes us feel comfortable that we are ‘on the right side of history’” and that we must instead “interrogate our certainties.” This framing equates the asymmetrical colonial structure of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with any bilateral “conflict” in which competing “sides” claim moral superiority. The very first premise—that the meaningful question is who is right or wrong in a war between sides—already subsumes anti-colonial struggle under an abstract model of reciprocal combatants.

This universalization becomes explicit when he writes that “war, repugnant and vicious as it is, continues to have a strong hold on people’s thinking,” because it “provides us with a sense of moral certainty as few other things can.” This description treats war as a psychological phenomenon that affects “us all,” with no differentiation between colonizer and colonized, occupier and occupied. The colonial relation is dissolved into a shared human susceptibility to moral overconfidence. The specific structure of domination in Gaza—the siege, the asymmetry of force, the juridical non-existence of Palestinians—is replaced by a general anthropological account of moral temptation.

The depoliticizing effect is clearest in the way he narrates the events of October 2023. He describes the Hamas attack as “an atrocious attack against civilians” and the subsequent Israeli onslaught as “the Israeli army besieges and relentlessly bombs Gaza City,” immediately integrating both into a single moral grammar of escalation, where the primary problem is the tendency of observers to seek “moral certainty” in identifying a side to support. The Palestinian population under bombardment thus becomes an instance of “war’s distorting gravitational field,” in which both “individuals and groups alike” are prone to simplistic narratives. This is not an interpretation I impute to him; his text explicitly states that “our partisan inclinations” lead us to “double down” and that conflicts such as Gaza are primarily moments where “the violence involved confounds any effort to reduce warfare” to simple categories. But the violence he treats as epistemically confounding is not symmetrical: the overwhelming majority of casualties in Gaza are civilians subjected to structurally enabled slaughter. Yet the category he deploys—“war”—erases this asymmetry, rendering colonial violence philosophically equivalent to reciprocal military conflict.

The conceptual signature of his political ontology emerges when he contrasts “moral certainty” with “moral clarity.” “Moral certainty,” he writes, is “the expression of an emotional and even spiritual need for the conviction that we are right.” “Moral clarity,” by contrast, requires that we “recognize the multi-faceted history of the events taking place” and “push aside the yearning for immediacy and certainty for the sake of a universal humanism.” The invocation of “universal humanism” as the standpoint from which the conflict is to be understood presupposes a vantage point outside the antagonism itself. The political subject is abstracted into a universal moral spectator who must suspend commitment to any side in order to achieve clarity. But anti-colonial struggle cannot be understood from such a standpoint because its intelligibility arises not from universal moral reasoning but from the structural logic of domination and resistance. McManus’ insistence that one must avoid “the kind of moral certainty that facilitates and exonerates” what “our worst instincts” demand reframes resistance—armed struggle against colonial power, in the case of Hamas—as a lapse into instinctual simplification rather than as a form of political agency structured by material domination.

This universalist lens becomes even more explicit when he warns that “in war, opposing sides are extremely rarely fully as good or as evil as we’d like to make them out to be” and that “the vast majority of modern war-time victims are civilians.” The first claim treats Gaza as a conflict between “opposing sides,” rather than a relation between a settler-colonial state and a besieged population. The second claim is empirically true but conceptually misleading: it folds the genocidal violence of Israel into a general account of wartime civilian suffering, erasing the juridical, spatial, and military asymmetry that defines settler colonialism. His concluding argument—“this new war [should] be carried out far more humanely than it has been,” ideally through “a ceasefire or another mechanism of peace”—further demonstrates the displacement. He characterizes the genocide as a war that ought to be waged more “humanely,” not as a colonial massacre whose cessation requires the dismantling of an entire structure of domination.

Each of these moves—equating asymmetrical domination with bilateral conflict, invoking universal humanism as the standpoint of clarity, treating colonial violence as an instance of war’s psychological temptations—follows logically from the political ontology grounded in a pre-given anthropology of human capacities. If the task of politics is to cultivate intrinsic human powers, then antagonism is never constitutive; it is a tragic deviation from the developmental telos.

In conclusion, McManus’ response misses that the philosophical critique in my article is inseparable from the analysis of imperialism. His framework cannot treat the structural determinants of global capitalism as constitutive without unsettling its developmental narrative. An adequate political ontology must begin from the structural contradictions that organize social reproduction, not from a pre-given anthropology that neutralizes them. McManus’ framework cannot meet this requirement, and his reply only widens the distance.

-Yanis Iqbal