For over sixty years, Selma James has been organizing from the
perspective of unwaged women who, with their biological and caring
work, reproduce the whole human race—along with whatever other
labor they are performing. This work goes on almost unnoticed
everywhere on the planet and in every culture. When this work is not
economically prioritized, politically protected, or socially
supported there are dire consequences for the whole of humanity,
beginning with women and children.
This
much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and
Class, compiles several decades of James’s work with a focus on
her more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of
C.L.R. James’s two masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and
Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership
with him over three decades. Her experience with the Caribbean
movement for independence and federation is reflected in her
introduction to Ujamaa, the extraordinary work of Tanzanians
to bypass capitalism, and much more.
Steeped in the
tradition of Marx urging the need for a “practical movement,”
James recounts the unusual history of how autonomous organizations
formed within the International Wages for Housework Campaign and
reshaped it. Women of color, queer women, sex workers, women with
disabilities … each independent but mutually accountable (including
to the men’s network with whom they work) as they confront sexism,
racism, deportation, rape, and other violence.
James makes the
powerful argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all
the movements’ people have formed to refuse their particular
exploitation, to end the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the
world. Our time is now.
