Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning

Selma James

Description

In 1972 Selma James set out a new political perspective. Her starting point was the millions of unwaged women who, working in the home and on the land, were not seen as “workers” and their struggles viewed as outside of the class struggle. Based on her political training in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, founded by her late husband C.L.R. James, on movement experience South and North, and on a respectful study of Marx, she redefined the working class to include sectors previously dismissed as “marginal.”

For James, the class struggle presents itself as the conflict between the reproduction and survival of the human race, and the domination of the market with its exploitation, wars, and ecological devastation. She sums up her strategy for change as “Invest in Caring not Killing.”

This selection, spanning six decades, traces the development of this perspective in the course of building an international campaigning network. It includes excerpts from the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which launched the “domestic labor debate,” the exciting “Hookers in the House of the Lord” which describes a church occupation by sex workers, an incisive review of the C.L.R. James masterpiece The Black Jacobins, a reappraisal of the novels of Jean Rhys and of the leadership of Julius Nyerere, the groundbreaking “Marx and Feminism,” and more.

The writing is lucid and without jargon. The ideas, never abstract, spring from the experience of organising, from trying to make sense of the successes and the setbacks, and from the need to find a way forward.

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Cyril Lionel Robert James
• Anti-racism
• C. L. R. James
• Marxism
• Postcolonialism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604867114
• Langue: English

Extrait

"…an intellectually ambitious attempt to synthesize Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism, and not with the usual sellotaped hyphenations."
Jenny Turner, London Review of Books
"It’s time to acknowledge James’s path-breaking analysis: from 1972 she reinterpreted the capitalist economy to show that it rests on the usually invisible unwaged caring work of women."
Peggy Antrobus, feminist, author of The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies
"For clarity and commitment to Haiti’s revolutionary legacy…Selma is a sister after my own heart."
Danny Glover, actor and activist
"The publication of these essays reflects in concentrated form the history of the new society struggling to be born. Their appearance today could not be timelier. As the fruit of the collective experience of the last half-century, they will help to acquaint a whole new generation with not only what it means to think theoretically but, more importantly, the requirement of organization as the means of testing those ideas. In this respect, Selma James embodies in these essays the spirit of the revolutionary tradition at its most relevant."
Dr. Robert A. Hill, literary executor of the estate of CLR James, University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Marcus Garvey Papers Project
"In this incisive and necessary collection of essays and talks spanning over five decades, Selma James reminds us that liberation cannot be handed down from above. This is a feminism that truly matters."
Dr. Alissa Trotz, associate professor of women and gender studies, director of Caribbean studies, University of Toronto
"With her latest book, Selma James reaffirms what has been evident for some time: she is quite simply not only one of the most outstanding feminist thinkers of her generation but, as well, an insightful and exceedingly intelligent political analyst."
Gerald Horne, historian and author, John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston
Common Notions is an imprint that circulates both enduring and timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, and visionary meditations on the organization of both domination and its refusal. Inspired by various traditions of autonomism in the U.S. and internationally, Common Notions aims to provide tools of militant research in our collective reading of struggles past, present, and to come.

Sex, Race, and Class The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1952 2011
© Selma James
This edition © PM Press 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-454-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927963
Cover by Josh MacPhee ( justseeds.org )
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
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Printed on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
Published in the UK by The Merlin Press Ltd.,
6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool NP4 6ND, Wales
www.merlinpress.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-85036-650-1
CONTENTS
A Grateful Preface
Marcus Rediker
A Winning Perspective
Nina López
A Woman’s Place (1952)
Columns from the newspaper Correspondence (1954)
Getting Politics Out of the Way
Miss Universe
Women’s Industries
Aubrey Williams and Wilson Harris (1966)
Women Against the Industrial Relations Act (1971)
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972) (Excerpts)
Women, the Unions, and Work, or What Is Not to Be Done (1972)
The Perspective of Winning (1973)
The Family Allowance Campaign: Tactics and Strategy (1973)
Sex, Race, and Class (1974)
Wageless of the World (1975)
Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983)
Jean Rhys (1983) (Excerpts)
Marx and Feminism (1983)
The Global Kitchen (1985) (Excerpts)
Strangers and Sisters: Women, Race, and Immigration (1985) (Excerpts)
The UN Decade for Women: An Offer We Couldn’t Refuse (1986)
The Challenge of Diversity: Reflections on a Conference (1990)
Women’s Unwaged Work: The Heart of the Informal Sector (1991)
The Milk of Human Kindness (2002) [Excerpt]
Venezuela [2004-2005]
An Antidote for Apathy
The Grassroots Revolution and the Managerial Class with Nina López
Sixth Global Women’s Strike Call [2005]
Rediscovering Nyerere’s Tanzania [2007-2009]
Interview Excerpts [2009]
Speaking at the U.S. Assembly of Jews Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid [2010]
Haiti [2010-2011]
Only Aristide Has the Mandate to Lead Haiti’s Recovery (January 18, 2010]
False Picture of Foreign Aid to Haiti (November 19, 2010] with Nina López
Black Jacobins, Past and Present
With Aristide’s Return Comes Hope
Speaking at the Aristide Foundation for Democracy
Guardian Articles [2010-2011]
The Tory "Big Society" Relies on Women Replacing Welfare
International Women’s Day: How Rapidly Things Change
Slut, Where Is Thy Sting?
Moran Doesn’t Want to Change Much
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jailhouse Lawyer [2011] [Excerpts]
Striving for Clarity and Influence: the Political Legacy of CLR James [2001-2012]
A GRATEFUL PREFACE
MARCUS REDIKER
S elma James is a treasure, as this volume of riches makes clear. For more than half a century she has played a significant role in a wide variety of radical organizations and movements, many of which are not nearly well enough known. From the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Facing Reality group of the 1950s, to the Race Today Collective in Brixton, to Global Women’s Strike, James has animated and embodied a kind of radicalism that is increasingly relevant in today’s world.
Her close association with the great Trinidadian scholar-activist CLR James provides a key to her political approach. One of the main ideas embodied in James’s writings is what the late George Rawick, another close comrade of CLR James, called "working-class self-activity": those many and various and often invisible things the working class, broadly defined, does for itself in the quest for emancipation. The emphasis is on action, agency, new meanings and possibilities generated, often unpredictably, from social movement and conflict on the ground. CLR James always emphasized the importance of new forms of struggle that bubble up constantly from below, often alongside and sometimes against established left-wing institutions such as unions and political parties. 1
If the promise of Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) was expanded by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and by the lesser-known but hugely important work of Thomas Spence, The Rights of Infants (1796), James has continued in this direction, asking how it came to be that "Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 5 percent of world income, and own less than 1 percent of world assets" and asking, impatiently, how can this sordid reality be changed. She was doing pioneering theoretical and historical analysis of "race-class-gender," with an emphasis on how each constitutes the other, long before this became a popular analytical approach during the 1980s.
James’s political theory and her organizing strategies thus come "from below" that is to say, not from intellectuals or party functionaries who tell working people what they should be doing, but rather from factory workers, housewives, prostitutes, and migrants, as the following pages will show. And those people come not only from London and New York but from places that range from Mexico and Venezuela and Haiti to Kenya and Tanzania. James insists not only on deriving her ideas from interaction with working people of all kinds and all nations, she consistently tests and refines them in the same constituency. From her very first pamphlet, which she discussed with her fellow workers and neighbors, she has always trusted not only the decency of common people, but their ability to think and act. "Every cook can govern," wrote CLR James in 1956. James carried that optimistic message into the woman’s world of work, the kitchen, and in so doing deepened and expanded its meaning. 2
The pamphlet James cowrote with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which is excerpted here, is, in my view, a classic of radical literature and one of the most important political documents of the 1970s, contributing as it did to both the working-class movement and the women’s movement indeed, showing activists in both that they shared a common struggle! The "Wages for Housework" campaign carried the message around the world. In this respect as in so many others, James’s work has consistently expanded our idea of what the proletariat is, moving beyond the factory gate to the household, the streets, and the prison.
A case in point is her recent work with prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and one of the world’s most eminent political prisoners. When James visited him at the SCI-Greene Supermax Prison in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, their wide-ranging political discussion turned to what prisoners do for themselve