In this paper, argue for de-exceptionalizing the Arab Gulf via materialist, Marxist analysis. My argument is two-fold. First, drawing upon a Marxist theory of class struggle, I argue that the story of class struggle and anticapitalism in the Gulf shows most strikingly how unexceptional the Gulf is and how patterns of labor exploitation and labor resistance there resonate with the same processes beyond the region. Second, I specify the structural position of the working class in the Gulf and discuss the class and racial legacies of imperialism in shaping current labor regimes. In this way, I challenge the binaries that still stubbornly get applied to the region: the binary between the supposedly “liberal” North and the “illiberal” South; between the “normal” capitalism of the North and the “deviant” capitalism of the South (and the Gulf in particular); and binaries that reify Northern democracy and Southern authoritarianism, extracting both from their larger social and class contexts.