Paul Gomberg, Anti-Racism as Communism (London: Bloomsbury Aca- demic, 2024), 272 pp., $108.00
Paul Gomberg’s Anti-Racism as Communism advances two intercon- nected theses. First, the construction of racial categories is inseparable from the global emergence and logic of the capitalist economic order and its corresponding class attitudes (26–27). Second, race must be placed at the center of an account of capitalism to explain workers’ exploitation and oppression (184). Anti-racism, for Gomberg, often has and indeed should play a decisive role in shaping the conscious- ness and leadership of working-class movements. Gomberg divides his book into two parts. Part One, titled “Origin and Persistence of Racism,” roots the development of racism in an overarching economic logic aimed at securing a reserve of cheap labor favorable to capitalist profit-making (31). Gomberg goes on to tie American anti-racist struggles to labor movements by asserting that they are implicitly one indissociable struggle. Part Two, titled “Fighting and Ending Racism,” takes up various theoretical perspectives on how race and racism are experienced and conceived today.
As part of his effort to prioritize the theme of anti-racism, Gomberg insists that a reductive, exclusively class approach cannot succeed in organizing workers around a shared program capable of realizing a communist social order. In doing so, he attempts to strike a difficult balance between treating racial categories as central to a Marxist politi- cal economy that explains inequality, while simultaneously insisting that an anti-racist workers’ movement must establish critical distance by separating (or “alienating”) itself from those identity categories in its struggle to overcome them (170, 174). Because racialization and racism are identified as historical phenomena tied to material relations that supported the emergence of capitalism, the recognition of this fact is crucial to the formation of a working-class movement. At the same time, for Gomberg, race as a category must be bracketed; it cannot be internal to a workers’ movement’s consciousness, but must instead be confronted externally as a core feature of capitalist social relations. Gomberg aims to unite anti-racist and labor struggles under one unified Marxist program. To accomplish this, he traces a historical ten- dency for emancipatory struggles to cohere across racial and worker lines. He provides striking accounts of how racism appears directly in the context of class warfare, functioning as a means of oppressing the working class at large (26). Race is defined as the “organization of social inequality based on a person’s bodily appearance” (25). On this definition, race must not be treated abstractly, rather it is integral to our social relations insofar as the “meaning of race is its function or role in capitalist society” (26). Gomberg is critical of the “interracial model” of racism which conceives of race simply as a matter of “white” and “black” group relations (167). That model separates race from its distinctively economic and class character, reinforcing the notion that working class whites benefit collectively from the oppres- sion of Blacks (145) despite how it contributes to their own economic oppression (21). Gomberg’s alternative is to advance “race-centered aracial Marxism” as the necessary framework for addressing the con- ditions of racism, exploitation and oppression (183), a position he for- mulates by relying on the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Oliver Cromwell Cox (177–183). This utilizes the idea of racial “harm” to grasp the existence of “unequal oppression and exploitation” (151). Gomberg’s laudable intention is to move beyond “intergroup” theories of racism without denying the unequal denigration of racialized sub- jects within a racist social order.
Negotiating this tension between “race-centered” and “aracial” thinking and praxis emerges as the book’s dominant theme. Despite Gomberg’s care to work through this “paradox” (175), the word “dialec- tical” does not appear once. While Gomberg is not required to subscribe to a dialectical conception of the world, addressing the place of dialecti- cal thinking in the broader Marxist theoretical lineage would have aided significantly in navigating the oscillations between centering race and alienating it. Gomberg sometimes separates different moments of racism – encountering racism externally within capitalist social relations compared, say, to internally in each individual’s consciousness – without fully developing either how these moments mediate one another or how each one is itself contradictory. For example, race does not merely inhabit people’s consciousness; it becomes an embodied identity. Yet it is also “the enemy’s name for us” (195), and therefore is at once a category of both alienation and of bodily substance that people experience – something of and not of a person. Gomberg’s race-centred aracial Marxism attempts to direct us towards such contra- dictions in capitalist social reality, but it is not immediately clear that Gomberg succeeds in adequately addressing such issues.
The book is at its strongest when analyzing the role that race has his- torically played in maintaining the capitalist system. In emphasizing the economic role of race as opposed to racial supremacist conceptions, Gomberg continually asserts that racist terror is functional to capitalism(57). From this he concludes that the only path to overcoming racism is through a break with the logic of the capitalist political economy. Yet one weakness of this work is in the presentation of its core Marxist argu- ments. While certain concepts like “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (82–83, 185) are developed, there is a lack and even absence of deeper engagement with other technical elements (to list just three: alienation; value theory; dialectics). To those unfamiliar with Marxist theory many claims will come across as leaps, while those already inclined towards the author’s position will encounter these same claims in the form of platitudes. This unfortunate dynamic emerges in the final two chapters where Gomberg attempts to convince readers that “only com- munism offers reasonable hope” (206) of producing a society without racism. Gomberg is at least partly convincing on this point. His tireless effort to establish the ways racism developed as a material feature of capitalist society simply cannot be ignored. This is why Gomberg’s criti- cisms of the routes to non- (or less-) racist societies imagined by Eliza- beth Anderson, Charles Mills, and David Lyons hit home (199–206).
Alas, the need to transcend capitalism and the likelihood of doing so in the medium term are separate issues. Gomberg concedes that both hope and skepticism are reasonable outlooks regarding the possibility of a communist and non-racist future (218). Our concern is that there is good reason to be skeptical about the evidence Gomberg marshals in favour of hope. To be sure, people will have to change and be changed through political struggle. Gomberg identifies various cir- cumstances that contribute to such change. “Only when the ruling class itself is weak and divided, only when factions of it mobilize the masses for their own reasons, is there revolutionary opportunity for the exploited and oppressed to change the course of history” (210). Cer- tainly, a weak and divided ruling class is a helpful opening for commu- nists. But we think that effective activism can generate such divisions in the first place. There is no need, contra Gomberg, to vacillate regarding whether the exploited and oppressed can self-mobilize or need to be mobilized by factions of the very class they seek to oppose.
Gomberg also sees a communist and non-racist future emerging out of the slow, transformative work of communists as they recruit others to the cause. General instability is the condition that lends itself the most to this outcome; the more instability, the more commu- nists can succeed (215). Since the capitalist financial crisis began to bite in 2007, there has been no shortage of instability, economic and other- wise. Although new activists have emerged alongside established ones, other more powerful trends have asserted themselves, such as reaction- ary, right-wing responses that include parts of the working class (Gomberg has nothing to say about class dealignment). If recent instability has actually contributed to a communist revival, Gomberg does not offer any evidence for it. We know the work of anti-racist com- munists is never done; it also seems that too little of this work has yet been successful despite the conditions being ripe.
