Race, capitalism and the spectre of Marx

A review of The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World by Kehinde Andrews (Allen Lane, 2023), £10.99

What is Anti-racism? And Why it Means Anti-capitalism by Arun Kundnani (Verso, 2023), £16.99

The Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) has exposed Britain’s racist history. This, along with a wider turn to seeing racism as a historical development, has led to a flourishing of books on race. Two recent publications take radically different attitudes to what racism is and therefore to how to challenge it. The popular academic Kehinde Andrews calls it a “psychosis” of white people, while Arun Kundnani, a former editor of the journal Race & Class, sees it as entwined with the development of capitalism. Andrews writes powerfully on how a systemically racist society uses mental health as a weapon against the oppressed. However, he is weak on practical solutions, in part because he analyses any class solidarity as a concession, weakening black people’s ability to fight for their own collective interests against what he describes as “white supremacy”. Kundnani’s book is much stronger, with a materialist understanding of racial identity allowing an exploration of how racism engages with class. Kundnani is in constructive dialogue with Marxism, including making reference to the more unfashionable ideas of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This is a welcome development, even if, as I suggest below, there are issues with aspects of his conception of Marxism.

The reality of how people’s class position affects their experience of race has been minimised in academic writings in recent decades, to the extent that examination of class is often seen as outdated and irrelevant. At a time when the British Conservative Party has appointed a black leader, Kemi Badenoch, who happily promotes racist polices, denying the influence of social class is unsustainable. The lived experience of racism is a fair starting point in analysing the problems we face, but it does not automatically indicate a solution. Any analysis of race requires an understanding of how the modern notion of “race” evolved, what has changed and what remains the same. Of the two books considered here, Kundnani’s contribution is by far the stronger one. It is intellectually coherent in its arguments and looks towards solutions.

Whiteness as psychosis

Andrews’ss The Psychosis of Whiteness is frustrating because he appears uninterested in the interaction between theory and struggle, even though his outrage at the everyday, systemic reality of racism makes him a popular writer. His method is similar to the one used by several recently published books, where writers foreground lived, anecdotal experiences to provide an understanding of society.1

Andrews notes the danger of adopting terms used to describe mental distress. Indeed, in a strong passage, he argues how schizophrenia shifted from being associated with “artists and middle-class women” to the black poor in the 1960s. This was a response to the Black Power movement and a shift to the condition being associated with violence.2 However, he justifies using the term psychosis in the context of “white supremacy”:

White supremacy necessitates delusional thinking in order to sustain itself. From the genocide in the Americas that cost tens of millions of lives to the savagery of slavery and the inhumanity of colonial barbarity, the West was built on the blood and bodies of the Black and Brown.3

In fact, his recourse to the language of mental illness tends to depoliticise racist horrors in the same way that media explanations linking terrorist violence by white people to mental distress does.

Andrews is dismissive of black activists and academics unprepared to challenge the system in the ways he recommends. He also sneers at white people driven to change their ideas, stating:

If [George] Floyd’s death was your awakening to racism, then there are years’ worth of steps you need to go through before you have the credentials to talk publicly about White supremacy. No matter if you have been on TV or how well you play a professional sport.4

Following the furore over white footballers supporting black players such as Marcus Rashford taking the knee to support BLM in 2020, I find this unhelpful. It is far less convincing than the attitude taken by Malcolm X, to whom Andrews often looks, just before his assassination in 1965:

So, when the day comes when the whites who are really fed up…when they learn how to really establish the proper type of communication with those uptown who are fed up and they get some coordinated action going, you’ll get some changes.5

Andrews accepts that there are shifts in levels of racism, relating to world events and economic circumstances, whether it is “white flight”, recession or the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the US. He comments of the “home grown” bombers from the 7 June 2005 London attack that the then prime minister Tony Blair “of course framed it as a foreign evil that had been allowed to fester in segregated communities.” He further notes that the “issue of economic marginalisation was ignored, but…more than anything else, the bloody images of children being cut down by British bombs was a major recruiting factor”.6 Despite such concerns over historical and material conditions, he dismisses Marxism, claiming it “denies the central and structural importance of racism in maintaining the capitalist world order. Marx managed to create a theory of the oppressed and ignore the most brutalised victims of the capitalist system”.7 His statement shows a worrying ignorance of Karl Marx and fails to understand that many colonised peoples have looked to Marxism precisely because Marxist organisation’s put fighting racism at the centre of their activity.8

However, Andrews is right when he considers the failings of the US’s only black president, Barack Obama, for instance, in his response to the murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, which inspired the BLM movement. Obama did not attack the systemic racism shown by police and security officers:

Obama’s response…instead was to launch a mentoring programme. My Brother’s Keeper…created for Black boys with absent fathers, funded mostly by the private sector and with the full-throated support of the conservative right. We can’t even call this blaming the victim; Trayvon Martin was visiting his father when he was killed.9

Unfortunately, Andrews does not offer general lessons about the failure of the “black faces in high places” strategy.

As for US history, Andrews argues:

Whiteness is not a fixed category and there is no perfect biological link to western Europe that defines a person as White. Like every other identity, it changes, depending on the times and the needs of a given society. Jewish people are a good example of a group that can switch in and out of Whiteness, to deadly effect.10

There is a valid point here about the construction of racism and its targets, but he is vague on the degree of mobility of specific groups and the potential beneficiaries. Can people choose to “switch out”? Does racism benefit specific social groups? Is it against the interests of poor white people or to their benefit? At times, he suggests that all white people benefit, but elsewhere, he quotes approvingly a well-known passage from WEB Du Bois arguing the opposite:

Poor Whites in the Reconstruction period in the South were bought off by the “psychological wage” of Whiteness, even though uniting with poor Black workers would have been better for their economic interests. It may sound patronising to argue that poor Whites vote against themselves due to the delusions of Whiteness, but history has shown this has happened repeatedly.11

This confusion means that even when looking at the relations between black people themselves in the US, Andrews misses vital signs of solidarity:

The person Malcolm X most frequently labelled a “modern day Uncle Tom” was none other than Martin Luther King… Malcolm saw King as a Tom precisely because of this leadership, that he could lead Black Americans to march straight down the cul-de-sac of token integration.12

This is unfair to both Malcolm X and King—largely because it ignores the political changes in each of them. Both radicalised away from faith in sources of social stability to which they had earlier looked. In Malcolm X’s case, this implied breaking with the limited political framework of the Nation of Islam, in King’s case, beginning to look to more radical approaches. Shortly before his death, Malcolm X went to support the civil rights struggle in Selma, Alabama, where King had been imprisoned. He told King’s wife and fellow activist Coretta Scott King that he had not come to make King’s job harder: “I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr King”. That is, “if you do not accept his kind of resistance, you will get mine”.13

In his conclusion, Andrews offers two solutions for black people opposing “white supremacy”. First, what he acknowledges as an impractical one: “avoid white institutions”. Given this impracticality he adds:

The second approach, one that I am currently working through, is to utilise the concept of “interest convergence” from (dare I say it) critical race theory. As racism is a permanent feature of society, the times we can enact change are the moments when the interests of the White population converge with those of racialised minorities.14

In the end, the Critical Race Theory that he looks to is a relatively tame doctrine, even if the US right sees it as a fire-breathing revolutionary one. In looking to a convergence of interests, he is sneaking back towards an approach Marxists advocate, even if he refuses to accept the existence of shared class interests. However, he then moves to a long and abstract attack on the idea of shared interests with any white people, based on an assumption that the endgame of the resulting battles is to “convince western governments to change”. He adds that black people need a revolution, but ridicules anti-capitalism, sneering: “If you feel part of an imaginary 99 percent of the world, one that needs the so-called White working class to join the global struggle for revolution, then you are centring Whiteness even in your revolutionary dreams”.15 There is no concept of a working-class encompassing white and black, like the NHS workers who organised together demanding Personal Protective Equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic, which disproportionately killed black health workers.16

King brought the masses on to the streets to radicalise US society—against class oppression as well as racial oppression—and Malcolm X looked for allies in revolution. Movements against imperialism have found inspiration and solidarity in “Western” struggles against war, racism and for climate justice; “Western” movements have in turn been inspired by the Arab Spring and the Palestinian resistance. The idea that these are unrelated makes no sense and that is Andrews’s great and repeated weakness.

What is anti-racism?

A strength of Arun Kundnani’s book is that, like King and Malcolm X, he looks to allies in the struggle against structural racism. His history of anti-racist ideas is concerned with how these ideas have been tested in practice. He excels at exposing the weaknesses of liberal antiracism and counterposing it to a radical, internationalist tradition. He rightly presents racism as a systemic feature not just of an abstract “system” but of capitalism, and he repeatedly emphasises that the oppression that comes with capitalism should never be accepted or normalised.

Kundnani shows how the role and form of racism shift, seen for instance in the rise in Islamophobia:

[A]nti-Muslim racism functions by setting aside all the contingent social and political factors that create the conditions in which some Muslims do indeed commit terrifying acts of violence, instead, seeing their actions as simply the automatic expression of an Islamic culture of fanaticism.17

Kundnani explains how theoretical understandings of race emerged from the reality of oppression and resistance with the expansion of European power, beginning with the Atlantic slave trade. The book examines the intellectual development of racial ideas, showing that they do not always link to skin colour. For instance, in 1850, the anatomist Robert Knox “wrote about Celts and Saxons as distinct races despite their having the same skin colours”.18 Kundnani correctly criticises idealist thinkers of the early 20th century. He focuses on social theorist Magnus Hirschfeld, who coined the term “racism” and was rightly concerned to challenge the rise of antisemitism in Europe. Nonetheless, Hirschfeld’s analysis tended to distance racism from “the routine political and economic violence of colonialism”.19 Hirschfeld viewed racism as a series of wrong ideas. By contrast, Kundnani asserts that it exists “as a societal force independently of whether the majority of people subscribe to it”.20

Kundnani convincingly argues that the greatest weakness of liberal anti-racism is seeing diversity alone as a progressive step forward, even under conditions of growing oppression. In the US, “liberals saw the growing number of elected representatives from Black, and later Latino and Asian, backgrounds as in itself a measure of anti-racist progress, irrespective of whether that increasing representation brought about any deeper changes”.21 Kundnani also points to the response to Enoch Powell’s racist “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, after which many liberals accepted “Powell’s core contention that the basic danger was people of other cultures overwhelming the tolerance of liberal England”.22

Kundnani examines how racism is maintained in “advanced” capitalist countries, and how attempts at social reform can increase racial division. For instance, the US government’s New Deal policies against the Great Depression in the 1930s created a distinction between workers “entitled to a ‘family wage’—sufficient to support children and a dependent, unwaged wife—and those who were not”. This policy excluded the areas of work where “Black people and Mexicans” were largely employed. It also ignored the fact that many black workers were women in domestic service and “thereby excluded”.23

The division of different groups within the working class, through sexism as well as racism, is something to which he repeatedly returns. In 1950, black Communist Vicki Garvin wrote that her mother had worked as a servant in white households, sometimes paid in leftover food and discarded clothing. She stood in “what was then known as the slave line hoping that she would be selected by one of the white women”.24 Garvin emerged as a powerful organiser and strategist in New York City’s black left. Her work in Harlem influenced Malcolm X and helped him to see the black struggle in the US as part of an international struggle for self-determination.

Kundnani discusses the rise of Black Power, the destructive role of neoliberalism and the importance of BLM in reinvigorating anti-racist struggle. Much of the book is focused on the US, but he also refers to the British industrial struggles of the 1970s, noting the interaction of anti-racism and strikes. There is “not a hierarchy of oppression, but an opening out to other struggles while maintaining the specificity of one’s own. Unity has to be made in the struggle, not assumed in the abstract”.25 He approvingly quotes the anti-racist activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who wrote in 1985 that “the fight against racism is, therefore, a fight against the state which sanctions and authorises it…in the institutions and structures of society and in the behaviour of its public officials”.26

Kundnani and Marxism

The book What is Anti-racism? is welcome for its serious engagement with Marxism, including a positive engagement with Lenin’s politics. It is precisely because Kundnani’s work is so refreshing in this regard that I want to question his arguments on left history in greater detail than a short chapter in a 250-page book might seem to warrant. The issue is important, in part, because the examples he uses can become the basis for future activists’ understanding and misunderstanding of what Marxism argued about race.

The frustration with Marxism Kundnani displays is neither surprising nor unique. In the period of anti-colonial rebellion after the Second World War, millions in the Global South saw some kind of Marxist ideas as key to liberation. Many became increasingly disappointed by the actual behaviour of Stalinist regimes that purported to be Marxist. In some cases, this led to views such as those of Frantz Fanon, that Marxism “should always be slightly stretched” when looking at such societies. In others, it led to an outright rejection of Marxism.27 For example, Aimé Césaire, founder of the influential Negritude movement, resigned from the French Communist Party in 1956. His furious letter to party leader Maurice Thorez came in response to two events. The first was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech”, revealing the crimes of the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Césaire had initially seen these revelations as offering an opportunity for international renewal of Marxism. However, the second issue undermined this view and his whole understanding of what Marxism offered. The French Communists voted in parliament to grant the government “full powers to carry out its North African policy”, which was predictably a brutal attempt to crush the Algerian resistance, which was fighting for independence from France. Césaire wrote that this made him realise that resistance to racial and colonial oppression were not of fundamental importance to the Communists. He concluded that if this was the way to further the interests of French workers, then “the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of colour against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism”.28

Though Kundnani does not mention the questions raised by Césaire, these underlying issues recur. Kundani tends to assume that a lack of concern with issues of race and imperialism was a fundamental flaw of Marxism rather than the result of the intellectual contortions required to justify its Stalinist debasement.

For example, Kundnani quotes Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto, saying that capitalism sweeps away “ancient and venerable prejudices”.29 Kundnani takes this up to justify his belief that Marxists see racism as “an ideological ‘legacy’ of pre-capitalist societies”.30 A more recent quote he cites to prove his point comes from an article by the Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood, which he uses to suggest that Marxists see class as a “deep structure that shapes the whole of society” while “racism is contingent and varies from one particular context to another”.31 I would not have chosen Wood to represent the Marxist position, as many Marxists disagree with aspects of her understanding of societal development. However, even within the article he cites, Wood states that racism is not a hangover from pre-capitalist forms and that its “material foundation” shifts from early capitalism with “chattel slavery”, through an imperialism “of outright conquest and colonisation” to something different in the modern world.32 Although it does not have an identical status to class within capitalism, racism is not an insignificant hangover.

Marx himself did not simply see capitalism as sweeping away pre-capitalist prejudices. Rather, he would point out that capitalism introduced new forms of mystification, rooted in its nature as a system based on commodities. As he argues in Capital:

The definite social relation between men themselves…assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.33

The key class relationship between workers and bosses becomes mystified as an equal exchange, rather than a relation based on exploitation, skewing the way the entire world is interpreted. In a similar way, racism emerges in the early history of capitalism as a justification of inequality, particularly in New World slave plantations, in a society that presents itself as being based on the level playing field of market exchange and equality of opportunity.

This relates to another issue, namely whether capitalism is progressive. Kundnani points to some of Marx’s early writings, including the Communist Manifesto and particularly four articles in the New York Daily Tribune from 1853. Here, Marx notes the advances of capitalism and predicts the development of an industrial working class in India that could create a path towards liberation. For Kundnani, this is the final word of Marxism. When, just four years after the Tribune articles, Marx unconditionally supported the Great Indian rebellion, Kundnani refuses to see this as an advance in Marx’s ideas, instead archly commenting: “Marx himself did not always remain consistent with this Marxist position”.34

Marx and Engels frequently developed or modified their view based on experience (and availability of sources), in this case particularly after Engels’s journey to Ireland in 1856. Kundnani occasionally slips into seeing racism as “colour prejudice”, perhaps because of his criticisms of figures such as Hirschfeld who opposed antisemitism from a liberal perspective and extended his ideas to develop a critique of racism. However, this leads Kundnani to miss some of the anti-racism in Marx and Engel’s writings on Ireland. As Engels writes:

Ireland may be regarded as England’s first colony and as one which, because of its proximity, is still governed exactly in the old way, and one can already notice here that the so-called liberty of English citizens is based on the oppression of the colonies.35

Bipan Chandra argues that Ireland was the only case in which Marx and Engels were able to study the reality of colonial rule at first hand, and “they not only did not see any destructive positive role for colonialism but also abandoned the mirror image of the transplantation of capitalism and therefore also its regenerative role”.36 That is, they abandoned the idea that capitalism, although socially destructive, is temporarily progressive and should be allowed to develop as it implies technical advances and the creation of an international working class. As capitalism spread internationally, it had no such “regenerative” role, and those who opposed the system should be supported even if they were not workers challenging it from a clear socialist position.

However, Marx and Engels retained a belief that the ability of people to have more control over their production and a greater understanding of how the world worked is desirable—even if this takes place in a highly contradictory fashion, linked to the brutal reality of capitalism. It is this idea of the possibility of historical progress that leads many people, particularly post-modernists and post-colonialists, to dismiss Marxism as simply part of Eurocentric Enlightenment thinking.

Despite his rejection of some elements of Marxism, Kundnani takes on board two theories associated with Marxism that are, in fact, problematic. These are the “labour aristocracy” theory and the “stages” theory of revolution. It might seem unfair to criticise Kundnani for his engagement with theories developed by Lenin, though I would argue that in practice, Lenin came to distance himself from both positions.

The theory of the labour aristocracy claims that a layer of the western working class—usually identified with the most skilled and best-paid—is bought off by the profits of imperialism and incorporated into supporting capitalism. This approach struggles to explain why it was this layer that led many of the most radical anti-capitalist struggles and revolutions at the end of the First World War. This and the absence of any clear mechanism through which these “bribes” could function have led several Marxists to question the theory.37

The “stages” theory—that a poorer country would have to go through a phase of capitalist development before a struggle for socialism could take place—was widely accepted by most Marxists before the 1917 Russian Revolution. However, in 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to argue that the revolution that had broken out with the overthrow of Tsarism could deepen and pass directly into a socialist revolution against capitalism. This was much closer to the perspective of another Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is based on the idea of uneven and combined development, it centres on the role of workers in a society where they are a minority, and it implies the rejection of the “stages” theory.38

Sadly, Kundnani does not mention Trotsky or engage with his approach. He does, however, praise the Trinidadian Trotskyist CLR James at various points. Kundnani argues that James “had to ‘blacken’ the orthodox European version of Marxism… His work…thus represents a pivotal moment in the history of Marxism’s nexus to Third World peoples”.39 Kundnani talks of how James broadened the idea of what revolution could be, beyond the apparent binary of “the 18th century revolutions in France and the US, led by the bourgeoisie, and the 1917 revolution in Russia, led by the industrial working class”. He has in mind James’s seminal book on the Haitian revolution, led by formerly enslaved Africans, The Black Jacobins. Kundnani notes James’s comments on the enslaved sharing characteristics with modern factory workers and concludes:

an African revolution organised by workers in the colonies… This history utterly refuted the white Left’s dismissal of Black agency. At the same time, for James, the Saint-Domingue revolution had to be understood in terms of its symbiotic relationship to the class struggles in France.40

For James, a central issue was what kind of society could be created through revolution. Although he celebrates the Haitian revolution, not least for its abolition of slavery, this did not mean that the conditions existed to create a classless, socialist society, in Haiti any more than France in 1789.

Kundnani correctly points out that James came to disagree with most Trotskyists on the role of the party, seeing the workers as spontaneously revolutionary and not requiring the kind of organisation Lenin built. Nonetheless, James retained core elements of the Marxist analysis of class, and specifically the importance of the working class. In 1967, James wrote, in the context of developing struggles on the African continent:

[Marx says] that the proletariat is united, disciplined and organised by the very process of capitalist production itself. That is what is happening today in the world to a degree far beyond what Lenin saw in State and Revolution. When [the company] Lever Hume and these others form a factory in Accra [in Ghana] and these other places and they mine bauxite and oil—they are socialising labour.41

James’s radical understanding of capitalism, class and its relation to racism and slavery would shape the approach of his fellow Trinidadian Eric Williams in the classic 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery. This was a pathbreaking Marxist analysis of the relationship of the Atlantic Slave Trade to early capitalism. Rather than adopting the kind of approach offered by Williams, Kundnani restates the dismissal of the Marxist understanding popularised by black American theorist Cedric Robinson, which wrongly claims that Marxists see the Atlantic Trade as “pre-capitalist”. Robin Blackburn’s magnificent book The Reckoning is one of the most recent Marxist works to examine how industrial capitalism and enslavement were entangled during the first half of the 19th century. Blackburn writes:

The owners of larger sugar estates in Cuba or Louisiana might retain some planter characteristics, but they and their backers were 19th-century businessmen with investment portfolios that included canal and railway stock. The most successful belonged to the world of high finance and ranked with the “robber barons”.42

This happened even if it was not the most profitable way to organise a capitalist economy in the long-run, and some among the US and British ruling classes were happy to consign it to history.

The term “racial capitalism” popularised by Cedric Robinson plays an important role in Kundnani’s work more generally. Drawing on the debate among South African Marxists from which the term originates, Kundnani argues: “Racist ideology was the story South African capitalism told about its own failure to make itself universal: it narrated the boundary between the capitalist sector and the subsistence sector as the boundary between European modernity and African backwardness”.43 This is difficult to maintain as racial segregation was universal across the colonial empires at the time of their greatest success. It was only as this model began to collapse in the aftermath of the Second World War that South Africa’s rulers felt the need to develop their own philosophy of Apartheid.

In this context, various South African Marxists took up the idea of racial capitalism to challenge a liberal view that the natural state of capitalism is democratic and equal and thus racism made South Africa unusual. It is true that one figure in this debate, Harold Wolpe, argued that Apartheid was in part a plan to keep sections of South African society in a pre-capitalist state, a form of “internal colonialism”. However, other South African Marxists showed, convincingly in my view, that precapitalist society had been swept away by the consolidation of the migrant labour system before the First World War. For instance, Michael Williams writes:

The very restructuring of African society entailed its destruction… What was at stake for the African people was nothing less than the untrammelled use of land indelibly interwoven into the entire fabric of their society. Take away from that use of land and the entire edifice collapses.44

Nowhere on Earth is now “outside” capitalism. Every state has to operate in the face of a globalised capitalist economy affecting all aspects of its organisation. Although the exploitation of colonial subjects differs from that of workers in imperialist states, they are not isolated from one another. The phenomena of workers travelling by choice or by force is as much part of capitalism as racism. Indeed, for a book concerned with capitalism as a world system, it is odd that Kundnani’s argument tends to minimise the central issue of the internationalisation of capital.

It is this internationalisation that helps explain why neither Marx nor Engels, nor the early Marxist movement, believed socialism could exist in isolated nation states. This is also why the Internationals were so important: the International Workingmen’s Association, or the First International, was established in 1864, the Second International in 1889 and the Third International, or Comintern, in 1919. Kundnani focuses on an incident at the Second International’s 1907 congress in Stuttgart, Germany. He writes: “organisers found a technicality to avoid a vote after the delegation from Britain made it clear they opposed independence for India”.45 This is not accurate, as the congress passed a resolution calling for an end to all colonial rule worldwide. What is true is that a “socialist colonialist” bloc emerged, pushing a pro-imperialist position. This was championed by a filthy speech from Dutch delegate Hendrick van Kol, arguing if socialists tried to offer Africans machinery without colonial military support, “Perhaps the natives will destroy our machines. Perhaps they will kill us or even eat us”.46 Given this attitude, it is disappointing that the pro-colonial motion was only defeated by 127 votes to 108.47

The resolution was a sign of a tendency that would lead to the effective collapse of the Second International with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, when almost all national parties supported their own ruling classes. In the 1907 congress, Kundnani focuses on the speech by Indian socialist Bhikaiji Cama, in which she demanded independence. Although Kundnani is wrong to suggest that this idea was new to the International, in the past this had indeed been a rather abstract demand. Having the voice of an active anti-imperialist from the colonised world was a first and a breakthrough. The Comintern was founded after the success of the 1917 Revolution, and was more centralised, in a determined effort to stop it repeating the disastrous failure of the Second International. Kundnani argues that Lenin was “opening up Marxism to multiple axes of struggle beyond class struggle narrowly understood”, addressing debates on race and gender often seen as only emerging on the left after 1968.48 Actually, the commitment of the early communists to change on these issues was far from tentative. It is only the conservatism of later Stalinist regimes that identified as Marxist, and the behaviour of Communist Parties from the 1930s onwards, that make it appear so.

Kundnani focuses on a disagreement between Indian revolutionary MN Roy and Lenin at the second congress of the Comintern in 1920 revolutionary Russia. He asserts that Roy shocked the congress with the “scandalous argument” that “white workers” could not overthrow capitalism without “entering into a shared struggle with people of colour”. He states that Roy insisted against Lenin that India had its own “revolutionary proletariat”. However, this was “ignored by the European Left”, which is why Lenin was wrong to support “anti-colonial nationalists”.49 Kundnani’s summary crashes a series of related arguments into one another. In fact, Roy’s suggestions were hardly scandalous and were presented to the congress alongside Lenin’s. The left forces gathered in Russia were also far from a monolithic on this or other points, and indeed the congress established 21 conditions for membership of the Comintern to try and root out opportunists, including those who might support imperialism.

Roy was treated as a serious figure. He had left India in 1915, a nationalist rebel in search of guns. By 1917, he was in revolutionary Mexico, had become a Marxist and co-founded the Mexican Communist Party.50 So, he was welcomed to the congress as a hero who could give advice on building in colonised countries, and he was invited to join the Comintern executive committee. Roy declined, preferring to stay in the field and actively establish an Indian Communist Party. His memoirs describe Lenin’s enthusiastic personal welcome and how the Russian told him that Roy’s actions in Mexico had anticipated his own “theory of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semi-colonial countries”.51 Nevertheless, the two men did have a serious tactical disagreement. This was about whether working-class and peasant activists were currently strong enough to organise independently in the specific contexts being discussed. Lenin’s theses for the congress said that while it may be necessary to enter into a “temporary alliance” with a bourgeois-democratic party, communists should “not merge with it and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form”. He saw this as central and called for a “determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends”.52 Roy thought, despite these commitments, Lenin’s approach was overly conservative, and even temporary alliances were a concession. As VB Karnik’s biography of Roy comments: “Roy had a rather exaggerated idea of the strength and independence of the proletarian movement in India”.53

Although these were serious arguments, the mood and flexibility shown by the first four congresses of the Comintern was quite different from those later in the organisations development, as it shifted from being a vehicle to spread international revolutionary organisation to a tool of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin.54 Kundnani is rightly suspicious of many of the conclusions the Comintern’s leaders reached in the later period. Yet, he does not distinguish these from earlier debates that did look back to the genuine revolutionary Marxist tradition.

Conclusion

Both Andrews and Kundnani raise the issue of how radical the struggle needs to be if we are to challenge racism and what allies can be found or relied on.

Despite saying that practical resistance involves working with white people, Andrews denies any shared interests, and his book has an oddly abusive tone towards black activists he disagrees with. Kundnani is far more reliable in charting the evolution of ideas about race and how they interact with evolving struggle. He is right to point out the historic failures of the left, and right to comment on its strengths. However, in terms of looking for allies, his repeated references to “the white left” suggest that socialism is something outside the struggle against racism. I would argue that Marxists are well placed to see how developments in capitalism continually refashion and revitalise racism.

Kundnani’s apparent belief that Marxists endorse the liberal idea that racism is a hangover from pre-Enlightenment ideology means that he does not accept this. This is not an issue for Andrews, who does not engage with practical political solutions, but it weakens Kundnani’s approach. Class cannot be dismissed as an aspect of “white politics” or something raised by the “white left” to de-emphasise the centrality of racism. The experience of class is key to the experience of capitalism, even though it is sometime expressed through and always intertwined with race. Despite its flaws, Kundnani’s book is part of a serious attempt to reconnect the anti-racist movement with earlier traditions and so deserves to be read and taken seriously by people who want to take down the racist capitalist system.

Ken Olende is researching a PhD on race and racism in modern Britain at the University of Brighton.

Notes