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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

nations. From this viewpoint, there are no British people, only people who
happen to be British. Likewise for the French, Germans or Nigerians, is
the implication. These national terms too are merely cultural constructs,
products of the collective imaginations of literary and other figures and
then transmitted to the wider population. 10
At the base of Gilroy’s thinking, as in Foucault’s, are traditional
abstract eighteenth-century French Enlightenment concepts of an undif-
ferentiated humanity. Divisions of race, culture, nation and class obviously
exist but these do not have the same ontological status as the category
‘humanity’. The latter is real but the former are cultural constructs –
‘discourses’ – distorting the real. One is back to the debate between Kant and
Herder (with Gilroy in the Kantian camp) and to the abstract humanism
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of Feuerbach. This abstract universalism reveals itself especially in his
most recent book Against Race with its notions of ‘planetary humanism’
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and ‘strategic universalism’. Cultural and national difference is thus con-
strued semiotically, as a product of arbitrary, historically imposed, oppo-
sitions which, at a deeper level, are substance-less and logic-less. Gilroy’s
subject is the racism of white people and later, the essentialism of black
people. His subject cannot be the historically changing class and national
characteristics and development of both the black and white populations
due to the changing local, national and global political economy. However,
the fact that race is a historical category can by no means make it substance-
less. As we shall see below, however, even this semiotic view Gilroy finds
too nationalistic, still too divisive of humanity into sub-groups, for his
taste.
Thus, this is a theory which, unlike the work of Hall, departs from
cultural constructivism and not from materialism. For example, standard
Marxist analyses from the time of Engels, which attribute British racism
to the material rewards derived from Britain’s long-standing colonial his-
tory, its monopoly of the world market and export of capital are not even
mentioned, much less critiqued. Gilroy emphasizes almost exclusively
the role of the earlier colonial period and of slavery in the development
of anti-black racism in Britain. This historical experience has obviously
been critical. This, however, is a tale about the past, not about the present.
There is no grasp of the material basis of contemporary racism. Gilroy does
not grasp the fact that contemporary racism is based in the very real,
material, economic and political oppression of entire peoples and groups
of peoples by real existing imperialism. He shows little understanding of
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the development of capitalism – the rise of monopoly capital and its export
in the form of finance capital which subordinates national economies world-
wide, despite their formal constitutional independence. This perspective

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