Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning

A Selection of Writings, 1952–2011

Selma James

• Editore: PM Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604867114
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Féminisme et théorie féministe

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.

MARX AND FEMINISM (1983)

I was invited in 1983 by Rev Kenneth Leech of the Jubilee Group, Church of England, to participate in their annual series of Lent lectures. That year they were marking the centenary of the death of Karl Marx. I aimed to be accurate about Marx’s analysis of exploitation in a way that was accessible to a willing reader. When feminism asserted that “the personal is political” it usually conveyed that women’s personal grievances were also political. I wanted to use this occasion to show that the reverse was also true; that the political was profoundly personal, shaping our lives, and that applying Marx’s analysis of capitalism to the relations between women and men illuminates them.

First about the title. I asked that this talk be called “Marx and Feminism” rather than “Marxism and Feminism” because Marxism is disputed territory. Just what it means, and whom it means, vary greatly from one political circle to another. But we can go to Marx and find out some of what he said. Then we can test his specific relevance to women, and to organizing within the women’s movement. That is what I plan to do, bearing in mind that Marx’s analysis of capitalist production was not a meditation on how the society “ticked.” It was a tool to find the way to overthrow it.¹

Since Marx concentrated on dissecting capitalism in order to fashion an organizing tool, it follows that he makes the most sense in the context of organizing, where his ideas can be tested and—if they are to remain viable—developed.

I must declare an interest early. His analysis has been indispensable to my organizing. He penetrates capitalist reality, including in my own life and, from what I can see, in other people’s, as no one else does, and helps keep me focused on that reality by warding off invasions of the enemy’s logic, excuses, and invitations to egomania.² I am profoundly grateful for that help.

Which leads to my second point by way of introduction. While this year is the hundredth anniversary of the death of Marx, which I am honored to be called on to celebrate with you in this way, it happens to be another anniversary. Today is ten years to the day since I was arrested in a sit-in of women and children at the main London post office in Trafalgar Square, when the Wages for Housework Campaign took its first public actions: protesting the government’s attempts to take Family Allowance away from women and put it into men’s hands.³ It seems entirely appropriate for me to celebrate that occasion—one is not arrested every day (at least not yet, though there are signs in this country that it may soon come to that)—to celebrate that occasion, together with the Marx centenary, here in this church.

And that leads to my third and final introductory point. You may know that some of us have got unusually intimate with churches in the last few months. I was fortunate enough to spend twelve days in November 1982 in the Church of the Holy Cross, King’s Cross, with about fifteen or twenty other women.⁴ And we liked it there. As a matter of fact, we liked it so much that the vicar (who was not exactly friendly) had a lot of trouble getting us out.

Thus before we plunge into the substance of the topic, you know something of the terrain from which the ideas spring that you are about to consider.

The women’s movement began in the late 1960s and early ‘70s—that is, this new women’s movement. There is always a women’s movement; women are always privately saying “No,” and from time to time organizing publicly to say “No.” But the vocal and visible massive movement that we know today began then, in a number of countries almost at once. There are some things that it made clear right away: that we were subject to domestic slavery; that we were often financially dependent on men; that we didn’t have equal pay; that we didn’t control the reproductive processes which went on in our own bodies; that we were the victims of sexual exploitation of many kinds; and that we were much more likely to be passive and much less likely to be effective compared to men—in a word, that we had colonized lives and personalities. And the question was not long after posed: what relationship does all this bear to class and class struggle as it had been traditionally defined and passed on to us by the Left?

On the one hand: how much are men to blame? Are they the sole beneficiaries of our exploitation? Are they the enemy, men one class and women another?⁵ On the other hand: what is the relationship of our demands as women to class? Equal pay may be about workers, but is abortion, sterilization, housework, rape, divorce, child custody and care, lesbianism, dress, personality, orgasms?⁶ The question ultimately came down to: who is “the working class” and what income level, work, political issues, demands, and actions distinguish it? The question could not have been more basic and more obvious, but it was almost never clearly articulated, because even posing it then challenged everybody: not only the State, but the Left establishment, even the Left alternative establishment.⁷ And because they were challenged, they worked overtime to dismiss, with the charge of ignorance or even betrayal, any of us who dared to ask. Marx, they said, had answered a hundred years before; surely that was enough! Under such pressure, clarity—even putting questions to yourself clearly—is hard won.

Now many things were happening at the same time as the women’s movement was forming itself. Other movements were also flexing their muscles and by their existence posing the same question for their sector, which made the business of defining the working class even more urgent and generally important. Others, even men if they were not in factories, were also told they were not working-class. And even some “workers” could be dismissed as “marginal,” “peripheral,” i.e., not central, insignificant, unable to influence the course of history or to have more than a minimal effect even in the struggle for their own liberation. Liberation was dependent on a separate, other, unrelated force: “the real working class.”

This was the time of urban rebellions, in the United States in particular, where millions of people challenged the American State, the most powerful and oppressive in the world. (Mind you, it has competition, but it wins.) The people who challenged that State’s power in the streets of its own major cities as well as in Third World countries like Vietnam (Vietnam was the most spectacular, but it was happening in many places) were also not traditionally considered to be part of “the working class.”

Sections of the Left tried to minimize the importance and the effect of these struggles, in order to protect “their” working class (which it seems, had a closed shop on effectiveness) and prevent it, apparently, from being upstaged. Others, mainly academics, even some who called themselves Marxists, seized this opportunity to say that Marx may have been right once but he was now passé. The working class are not the “gravediggers of capitalism,” as he had said; they were never going to do anything; they had all sold out—they had refrigerators.

We can laugh at that now, but they did literally say that, especially about the working class in the United States. These others, Black people (presumably the ones without fridges), students, “peasants,” they were the ones with the consciousness and the will to take on the job of overthrowing capitalism, to the exclusion of, even in spite of, “the working class.” Marxists and anti-Marxists alike asked us to choose between “the workers” and “the others.”

In the midst of this confusion, some of us were clever enough to look for ourselves at what Marx had to say. We were not satisfied with analyses in jargon of what he “really meant”; or assertions by learned academics that the young Marx—German poet and philosopher—was superior to the mature Marx—German immigrant to England, organizer, and theoretician. It did not pass our notice that it was academics who carried the greatest weight in defining what Marxism was to be. From universities they head organizations of the Left and write the books that the Left studies, discusses, and commends to us.

We refused also to be satisfied with what Marxist governments, which rule at least half the world’s population,⁸ said Marx was about. The emphasis and interpretations of governments are shaped by their need to retain power. Thus Third World governments may need to defend the Russian or the Chinese brand of brutality on which they depend for defense and aid, even if they would prefer not to. “Put not your trust in princes” applies even to Marxist princes.

Those of us who read Marx found out a number of things. It is not possible to go into all of them here, but some basics should be generally known, and since Marx is not hard to understand (and is a brilliant and exciting exponent of his views), it is not difficult or painful to know them. I will summarize very briefly some things that I believe are fundamental, and then relate them to the women’s movement as we know it, and to other sectors of society which are also visibly organizing and also defined out of the working class. To define, or rather redefine, who are the working class is an ambitious goal. Luckily, the truth can usually be expressed simply.

Marx said that what distinguishes one society from another is the way in which human beings relate to each other in the course of working to reproduce ourselves: to survive and to develop as human beings. What distinguishes the social relations in which we reproduce ourselves in capitalist society is the wage relation: work previously done for a feudal lord or a slave master takes the form of waged work for an employer. But, he said, it is not our work that we sell for wages. It is our ability to work that the employer buys. Marx calls this ability to work labor power. By buying the use of our labor power, the employer buys the right to tell us what to do for a fixed time, for the forty or fifty hours a week that it belongs to him, and to own all of what we produce in that time. He gets as much as possible out of us during that agreed time.

In part of that time, let’s say two, three, or four hours a day, we are able to produce the equivalent of the wages he pays us: we receive what we produce in that time in the form of wages. Thus that time is paid time, that work is paid work.

For the rest of the day, what we produce is kept by the employer. Thus for the rest of the working day we work for free.

I’ll repeat that, since this is the nub of Marx’s work (which, by the way, he fully understood quite late in his productive life). In part of our working day, we produce enough for the employer to cover our wages, his cost for hiring our labor power. The product of that part of the day is paid to us; thus in that part of the day, we do paid work. We continue to produce for the rest of the day, but the employer keeps that. So for that part of the day we are not paid: for that part of the day we do unpaid work. Marx called that exploitation.

That is the heart of all that Marx said. When he had grasped this, it focused all he had said before. The social relation which is capital is, according to him, that capital owns and does what it likes with our labor time and its product.

The ratio of unpaid work time to paid work time he called the rate of exploitation. So that if in four hours of an eight-hour day, you produce enough to pay your wages, and in the other four hours you work for free, the rate of exploitation is 100 percent: you do twice as much as you get paid for doing. You produce 100 percent more than you get paid for.⁹

But capitalist appearances are deceptive. The wage you get looks like payment for the whole day. The wage, which keeps you alive and able to continue to work, hides the unpaid part of your working day, hides that there is an unpaid part. You feel ripped off, but it’s hard to put your finger on what appears to be a fair exchange. This “fair exchange”—of labor power (which works a whole day) for wages (which pays for only part of the day)—hides robbery.

Now, ever since society was divided into classes (and it wasn’t always), the working day had a paid portion and an unpaid portion. Those of us who were serfs worked for ourselves only after we had finished working on the land and the crops of the feudal master. When we worked on the land assigned to us we were paid—with what we had ourselves produced, which kept us alive and able to continue to work. When we worked for the feudal lord on his land, we worked for free—for the right to keep what we grew on our own patch.

Those of us who were slaves did paid work too: the master had to give us food and clothing and shelter, not much but some, to keep us alive and working, and what we produced in one part of our working day paid for this. But the rest of the time during which we expended our labor power was unpaid time: its product was kept by the master; no part of it came back to us in any form.

Thus the capitalist way, paying us wages for the daily or weekly or monthly sale of our labor power to keep us alive and working, is merely the latest form of dividing the working day between paid and unpaid labor so the ruling class can appropriate, can steal, our labor time. But it has wide implications.

There is a book on rape by a feminist called Against Our Will.¹⁰ It i...