Malcolm's Reviews > What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism

Liberal states and liberal practice are both extremely good at incorporating and defanging radical critique, reducing anti-racist and feminist struggles to questions of representation and leaning in. Our workplaces are woven through with similar demands, training in ‘unconscious bias’, and overburdening especially People of Colour with representational and advocacy work while the rest of us carry on despite the eloquent strategy documents our committees produce (Sara Ahmed is extremely good on these problems). Arun Kundnani is having none of it!

Kundnani opens his powerful critique of contemporary anti-racist politics with a two-stranded criticism. The first is of liberal anti-racism as focused in building inclusion in a tolerant but still oppressive class system, while the second is focused on the Left view that racism is a tool deployed by the class elite to divide working class struggle. The first is a criticism that class oppression is still oppressive, while the second is based in the recognition that this Left view fails to recognise racial capitalism and imperialism as fundamental to the global capitalist order.

Throughout the first half of the book there is a powerful, internationalist, perspective n anti-racism as anti-imperialist practice, and a clear sense that racial capitalism is fundamentally grounded in imperialism. Yet I couldn’t help the feeling as the argument progressed that his analysis become increasingly focused on neo-liberal capitalism as the focus of opposition, rather than capitalism per se. Thankfully, by the time he got to the conclusion to weave together these threads it was clear that the neo-liberal emphasis is a question of currency and the dominant form capitalism takes. In the last few pages it all comes together powerfully, with, on p243, the observation that “Neo-liberal ideology has been wracked by a tension between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its well-founded fear that such a system would not be readily accepted”. In his view, then, the neo-liberal model acts against racist abuse and discrimination because it is antithetical to its idealised market, but at the same time he notes (on p246) that “recent electoral successes of racist politicians and parties are not the result of a backlash against antiracist progress; they are winning by making explicit in their political rhetoric what is already implicit in the violently racist practices of nominally liberal states”. In this way he weaves the imperialist character of capitalism into the bordering regimes and carceral states of contemporary practice.

It’s a sweeping a powerful analysis and call to action, not to immerse anti-racist struggles in wider class-based politics, but to recognise alliances, politically shared interests, and the multiple paths to the shared end. He does so with a three part sweep through key strands of 20th century thinking, action and practice. The first is the emergence on liberal anti-racist ideals in (it might seem paradoxically) Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and in the USA in work by anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. The second is the long Marxist engagement with imperialism from the mid-1910s, and the fraught debates and decisions of the Comintern in the 1920s around the place of anti-colonial, national liberation struggles in the development of socialism, with its communist goal. The third is the place of ideas of race in neo-liberal capitalism, and bordering and other carceral regimes as disciplining working class practice and maintaining oppressive regimes that become so pervasive that there is no need to explicitly enforce them.

Kundnani builds these arguments based on an impressive array of literature and engagements – drawing on key anti-colonial thinkers – MN Roy, Fanon, Nkrumah, Claudia Jones, Stuart Hall, A Sivananandan – as well as less well known or recognised analysts such as Anton De Kom, Johnnie Tillmon, and H Rap Brown. Amid this he also recovers Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King from the liberal civil rights discourse to the much stronger anti-colonial and class conscious that is obvious in their work. It’s an intriguing collection of thinkers and activists, or rather thinker-activists, that shore up his case delineating anti-racism and anti-capitalism from liberal practices of inclusivity, as well as asserting the fundamental centrality of racial capitalism to contemporary struggles, and the ways that the neo-liberal version of capitalism upholds that fundamental centrality of race.

It’s a compelling analysis, challenging us to view many of the takens-for-granted and dominant approaches in new ways – or at least more sceptically, and pushing us a more fundamental way of approaching anti-racist politics and practice. That means it’s not an easy read – it is clearly argued, well written, engaging, and accessible, but the argument is likely to be a profound challenge to many. That makes it essential reading.