Our Time Is Now

Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet

Selma James, Nina Nina Lopez

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781629638386
• eBook ISBN: 9781629638546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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, James draws on half a century of organizing across sectors, struggles and national boundaries with others in the Wages for Housework Campaign and the Global Women's Strike, an autonomous network of women, men, and other genders that agree with their perspective. There is one continuum between the care and protection of people and of the planet: both must be a priority, beginning with a care income for everyone doing this vital work.

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 destroy the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. Our time is now.

Introduction

Margaret Prescod

This second volume of writings by Selma James, Our Time Is Now, deepens and develops the themes of the first selection published in 2012.¹ I am thankful for this opportunity to review the long road she and I have travelled together.

In 1974, I thought the author of Sex, Race, and Class was Black.² When friends told me she was not, I argued that a white woman could not have written a pamphlet that had such clarity about race and autonomy. Nearly fifty years ago, Selma James wrote about what today in academic circles is called “intersectionality.”

In a women’s study group in New York City that was the precursor to International Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWWFH), Audre Lorde, the distinguished poet, Andaiye from Guyana, and others of us would discuss how as Black women we could not cut ourselves up into parts—the part that was a woman, Black, low-income, lesbian, etc.—we were a whole and we faced the oppression and discrimination that came with each part. We could not choose one over the other. Uniquely, Sex, Race, and Class spoke to that.

When I was a young teacher in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in Brooklyn, I sat in the aides’ room during breaks and lunch; I could not stand to be with the teachers who were white and, for the most part, racist and disrespectful of their students. It was in this context that our group questioned what feminists were going on about: a job outside the home never meant liberation for us, now or historically.

Sex, Race, and Class started with those with the least. It assumed the women’s movement was broader than white middle-class feminism. This made an opening for women like me, who did not see our own situation in what was being put forward as feminism, to be active on women’s rights. It meant that what I had been doing with welfare mothers in the community and their children at school was part of the women’s movement. Mainstream feminism had never acknowledged the Black women who not only held their families together, figuring out how to do the difficult job of raising their children with the fewest of resources, but were also the activists in their communities. Demanding money from the State rather than competing with men for a career was not considered feminist.

The perspective that Sex, Race, and Class put forward enabled those of us—Black women—who wanted to work with and in the Black community but were fed up with the sexism of organizations dominated by men to find our way, find our voice, find our autonomy.

Selma’s writing brought a freshness, an easily understood and practical analysis. As a Black immigrant from the Global South—Barbados—I easily related to “A Woman’s Place,” even though it was written in 1952 Los Angeles. It wasn’t bogged down in the academic formulations that so many political people get caught up in. The language was popular, straightforward, and it was full of home truths. As a fan of her husband, CLR James—from Trinidad—I was delighted to learn that he had encouraged her to write it.

“A Woman’s Place” described and identified caring work as the nub; this was then developed in the 1970s classic she co-authored, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.³

But it was Sex, Race, and Class that made the biggest impression on me—it inspired me to borrow money to travel to London to meet the woman who had written it and to see if indeed she was the real deal. Turns out she was.

The International Wages for Housework Campaign (WFH) Selma founded was not simply an analysis. It was a perspective and a demand. It didn’t have a missionary approach about helping others—we were all in the struggle for our own liberation. That impressed me. WFH wanted to act, to campaign for money for mothers, for caregivers. Though we were not at what left analysts called “the point of production,” we were workers!

The phrase “unwaged” work, which she coined, hit home to me. I grew up in a small rural village in a British colony. I saw how hard the women worked: the cooking, the cleaning, growing food, taking care of the children, making and washing the clothes, comforting everyone, trying for their families to have a life of dignity. But hard work did not equal a pay cheque, even when entire communities survived on this work. So focusing on unwaged workers, on campaigning for money for caregivers, starting with those with the least, in my village, as in New York City, made sense as a step in changing the world.

Raised in the movement of the 1930s that won social security and welfare, Selma brought her working-class experience, including time working in factories, into the WFH Campaign. (She does not have a university degree.) A member of the US organization headed by CLR,⁴ she joined him in London, England, after he was deported under McCarthy. She did support work for the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements.⁵ She was the first organizing secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, and a key witness in the famous Mangrove trial, the first in Britain where Black defendants challenged police racism and won.⁶

From 1958 to 1962, the Jameses lived in Trinidad, spending months in Barbados and Jamaica, working for independence and federation of the English-speaking Caribbean. The lessons and skills learnt along the way were integral to Selma’s work as international coordinator of the WFH Campaign and, from 2000, of the Global Women’s Strike (GWS).

Meeting the Campaign inspired Wilmette Brown, who had been in the Black Panther Party and had lived and worked in Africa, and me to found Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWWFH) in 1975. We organized with welfare mothers and Black and Puerto Rican students in the SEEK program at City University of New York (CUNY), who were demanding stipends and book money and for their welfare checks not to be cut if they received either. We also organized with Black sex workers, and the founding of the New York Prostitutes Collective, which later became USPROS (US PROStitutes Collective), grew out of that.

Her pathbreaking piece “Sex, Race, Class … and Autonomy” relates the unique theoretical and practical process that led to the creation and development of autonomous organizations within the WFH Campaign, now best known as Global Women’s Strike. Autonomy has been the key to keeping the Campaign and every organization in it focused on attacking racism and every form of discrimination in every struggle. It has been the basis of forty-five years of continuous effective organizing. It lifts the perspective of Wages for Housework from an academic exercise to a concrete way of organizing internationally, despite and against the divisions among us. With Black Lives Matter bursting out nationally and internationally, autonomy and how to work together across sectors is pushing forward onto everyone’s agenda. This piece is useful now for now.

Soon after BWWFH was founded, there were problems with the New York WFH Committee, which was white. They accused us of being “too pushy,” disagreed with our focus on mothers who were on welfare, and refused to work with us. The WFH groups in England, Canada, and the US stood strongly with us, defending Black women’s right to autonomy, making sure that we had the support and resources we needed to carry out our campaigning. The New York Committee dissolved. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who led the WFH groups in Italy, told Selma that we Black women were “presumptuous,” and the international, which was coordinated from London, broke relations with Italy.

So there was a split on race. Perhaps we should have written about it at the time, but we didn’t see the point of putting our resources into a public fight that would have distracted from the organizing we were learning to do.

We carried on with our successful campaign to ensure that mothers were able to keep both their welfare payments and their student grants without reduction. We formed the Queens College Women’s Action Group on the campus where I was working and launched the “No Cuts Just Bucks” petition. We were also able to win the first childcare program at CUNY for students, faculty, and staff.⁷

In preparation for the first congressionally mandated conference on women in Houston, Texas, in 1977, we formed the Coalition of Grassroots Women. It included women like Beulah Sanders, a former president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, who got delegates elected to conference. We took our BWWFH newsletter Safire and strategized with London by phone⁸—Selma reminded us that we were not lobbyists but movement people trying to get a job done. We succeeded in getting the National Women’s Conference to pass the pathbreaking resolution that welfare should be called a wage. The press release announcing this victory is included in this volume. It was drafted by Selma after we called her—we were exhausted! She read it to us by phone the next morning, and we were able to issue it.

The Houston resolution was never implemented, but Phoebe Jones, who jointly coordinates the US network with me, has made the case that it helped to hold off federally mandated welfare work requirements for two decades.

By the end of the 1980s, mainstream feminism had dug in, heralding that any job outside the home was where true liberation lay. The right to welfare was being chipped away, and Black welfare mothers, undefended with few exceptions, were being targeted by both Republicans and Democrats.

The Soviet Union was breaking up, and the anti-nuclear movement was exploding. In the UK, the WFH Campaign and BWWFH were witch-hunted for refusing to be with either the Eastern or the Western blocs—insisting instead on organizing at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp with Yellow Gate, which was stubbornly non-aligned and anti-racist.⁹

Many an organization would have folded as the media trashed the WFH leadership in the UK. But Selma was not fazed. She’d been through the McCarthy witch-hunt, she knew what to do to keep the Campaign focused and unafraid—we not only survived, we came out of this period stronger.

I moved to the West Coast for personal reasons, and in the mid-1980s I founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders out of outrage after seeing a TV announcement that eleven Black women were victims of a serial murderer in South LA. Selma, though in London, was a phone call or letter away and a constant source of encouragement—we always prioritized money for long distance calls to keep the network together.

As the point of reference for the international campaign, Selma worked closely with the late Clotil Walcott, founder of the National Union of Domestic Employees in Trinidad and Tobago, and the late Andaiye, who had returned to Guyana and was a founder of Red Thread, a women’s organization. She made sure Clotil, a fantastic grassroots organizer, would have the global platform she deserved. In “Andaiye: The Uses of Autonomy,” Selma reviews how applying the Campaign’s perspective gave Andaiye new insights into Guyanese history.

During the UN Decade for Women and follow-up conferences we took our perspective to the UN. Our fifty-seven-strong multiracial delegation to Beijing (1995) from countries of both the Global North and the Global South reflected the network we had built. Working closely with Andaiye, who was a member of the CARICOM delegation,¹⁰ we successfully combined grassroots campaigning with lobbying in the halls of power. The pieces published in the “Time Off for Women” section give an idea of the organizing in this period.

The section culminates with “An Income to Care for People and Planet,” with Nina López, which brought together human reproduction and the reproduction of the natural world as one whole—greater than the sum of its parts. A crucial campaigning development.

In “Revisiting the Works of CLR James,” Selma’s observations and insights about two CLR classics, one on the Haitian Revolution and one on cricket, and her interview about their life and work together are particularly valuable and have lessons for organizing.

As she often says, it is not enough to lift up those who made the revolution in Haiti over two centuries ago, we must stand with their descendants—the Black Jacobins of today who are struggling to defend that revolution—not only in words but in action. So when, in 2003, I connected with the distinguished and dedicated Haitian Pierre Labossière (the year before...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Margaret Prescod-From Wages for Housework to a Care Income (1977–2020)
• Chávez, Nyerere, Aristide versus Thatcher (2013–2018)
• Ujamaa: The Hidden Story of Tanzania’s Socialist Villages (2014)
• The Struggle of Prisoners (2014–2020)
• Revisiting the Work of CLR James (2017–2019)
• The Grassroots Labour Movement That Shook Britain (2015–2020)
• Sex, Race, Class … and Autonomy (2020)
• Index
• About the Authors