Selma James

Selma James (born Selma Deitch; formerly Weinstein; August 15, 1930) is a writer, feminist, and social activist who co-founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign and was a coordinator of the Global Women's Strike. She is Jewish, and the historian and writer C. L. R. James was a long-term partner of hers.

• When we say Wages for Housework, we say first of all that the work that women do must be visible and must be acknowledged not merely as work, but as a political fact, as a struggle: that women refuse to do this work. I want to explain that, because a lot of the work that women do is really the maintenance of the human race. And it's clear this work must be done. And not only that it must be done but that it is clearly the most important work in the world. But we can't do it alone, and we don't want men to "help." That's not enough. That's nothing like what is needed...we must reorient society to caring. It's not that women should have help caring; it's that to be civilized is to be concerned about each other, and in a situation where there is not want anywhere in the world, where we all have or can get what we need. Guaranteed income does not address this at all...Wages for Housework is like a searchlight into our real lives and the real relations among us. So whereas we want a guaranteed income, what we want is a change. And the change must come from reorienting the whole society against the divisions among us. But first we must see the divisions, acknowledge them, acknowledge the work, so we can refuse them, and build a movement against them. And that's some of what Wages for Housework is about doing. (from 2009 interview)

• With the growth of women's power, the history of all kinds of contributions by women, as individuals and as a sex-in literature, language, art, music, politics, religion, agriculture, science, etc.-has at last begun to surface. For the record, women are not the only sufferers at the hands of historians. The Great Man theory of history hides not only Great Women but defines almost everyone out of greatness. Specifically, the invisibility of women's work as organizers-which includes every woman rather than just "Great Women" (writers, scientists, painters, and so on) - itself reflects a class bias, a career bias, in the women's movement, itself perpetuates a historical censorship in another form.
  • from "Strangers and Sisters: Women, Race, and Immigration", originally published in 1985)

• It is quite important that we look at our habits and see that they conform to our principles, not the other way around.

• With rare exceptions, we in the movement have to be understood by anybody who wants to hear. We have to be available, accessible, with words of one syllable that relate to people's real experiences of life and struggle.

• ...being fully antiracist is dependent on international connections, on knowing the various ways in which people live and struggle, and incorporating that into what you stand for and what you must be supporting. So then whatever you are doing, you are accountable also to them. There is no other way to be antiracist except what you do takes into account other people's struggles and ensures that you never do anything that undermines other people's struggles. This is not easy but it's absolutely crucial.

• identity politics: I have been exploited and therefore I have a right to exploit her, her, him, and him. That's identity politics. I have ambition and I have a right to fulfill my ambition at her expense, her expense, her expense and her expense, because I have been exploited. And when we finish with Zionism, which indeed we will, then we will also have finished with the most crass form of identity politics, the one which allows those who have suffered - or in this case the descendants of the sufferers to claim the right to exploit, kill and maim without limit

• The claim that women are liberated if some women take jobs at the top is a capitalist fantasy. The same is true for people of color, and sexuality, and every sector.

• Black Lives Matter has meant so much everywhere, including in Haiti and Palestine, and it strengthens other movements for justice against murder by the state—the human rights defenders in Honduras and Thailand who are being assassinated by corporate agents for defending Indigenous and small farmers’ right to land, for example.

• You have to fight for every right and every access and every penny that is yours by right or that you want to make yours by right. That is true for every sector...Organizing for change in particular sectors on the one hand, and the sectors coming together internationally to change everything on the other, is I think the political question of our time.

• A Care Income would increase the status and the power of carers for people and planet, and for this reason we face opposition from those who want to keep the power in their own hands or in the hands of their masters. With the pandemic and the climate emergency, everybody knows that caring matters. But it’s one thing to win the argument, it’s another to win the struggle. It’s between us and the billionaires.

• ...my intention when I write is to provide organizing tools. Most come directly from lessons we learnt in the course of organizing. I hope they will help others. Also, people are misled by structures and strictures that come from academia or the “vanguard” left—or both. Endless hours are spent discussing “theory” when, ultimately, the real theory is in what you do and how you do it and with whom and against whom.

• (about her work with Mariarosa Dalla Costa in 1972) …we were developing a new perspective that was international and far more comprehensive. Up to then, the working class was defined as waged workers at the “point of production”—the only ones who could make fundamental change. We were redefining the working class to include housewives and all the unwaged. It was not only antisexist, it was antiracist and saw the reproduction of labor power, in fact of the whole human race everywhere, as work at the service of capitalist accumulation. We said if you work for capital, waged or unwaged, you are part of the working class, the subversive class.

• (asked about the main thesis of the 1952 book A Woman’s Place) …It was that women are engaged in the work of making society, of making children - that is an enormous job - and that the separation between women and men is harmful to all of us.

• ...we have a slogan in London: “Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, fighting for our loved ones’ lives.” And that’s not a Romantic view of women’s work that — women’s justice work. That is the reality. That’s who does it. That’s who’s on the line in front of the prison where men and women are held unjustly. It’s women who are doing this work. And it’s an extension of the caring work that we have always done.

• ...if any sector of women begins to spell out their own situation and how life is for them, others can identify, say, “Yes, that is an element of my life, as well.” That’s been true with lesbian women. It’s been true with single mothers. It’s been true with prostitutes. It’s been true with women with disabilities also. You know, you know the ways in which you are constrained better by hearing the experience of others who are even more constrained than you are. And it’s certainly true with women in prison, as well.

• (asked about the pamphlet she published in 1974 Sex, Race and Class) SJ: The point was that by that time, there were - there was a real problem with how do you balance the movement of black people, the movement of immigrants, the movement of women, the movement of lesbian and gay people. How do they relate to each other? And there was a kind of competition for priorities. And I wrote the pamphlet to say, “Look, we are all in the same struggle, and there is a connection between all of us that we must draw out. But in order for that connection to be made, each sector will make its own autonomous case, and on that basis we can unite.” How exactly? I don’t know, because I wasn’t the left in that way. I didn’t feel I had to have the answers, only the questions. And that’s what “Sex, Race and Class” is about, really.

• … a lot of feminism has gone into individual careers and into ambition, and there’s some evidence that the class line between women is much greater now with feminism, because a whole set of women have gone into the part of the elite. They get pay equity. They get a lot of kudos, a lot of—they are very accepted in the society. And the rest of us are getting screwed. I mean, our pay is not going up. The child care doesn’t exist or is very bad. Welfare has been abolished. And we really need to have another reason to be together, which is the real conditions of our lives, rather than an individual ambition. And I felt that the SlutWalk was part of that new movement, which says it’s not ambition we want. We want to have the freedom to live the lives as we like them, and we are together for that. It was very exciting.

• (AG: ...you said, “I think we have to know that prison is part of society”) SJ: …in order for so many people to be incarcerated, they have to convince the population that this is no part of their life, that prison is outside of their society, that it’s not something they should be concerned about and fighting about and supporting, that it is other than the life we are living. But in fact, in my view, the fact that so many people are in prison in the United States not only shapes the lives of millions—the families, etc.—but it means that the whole society is much more repressive, because the standards of prison are constantly imprisoning the rest of us in crucial respects. But the number, the millions of people, of children who are growing up with a parent inside and who will themselves be part—you know, Mumia’s son is in prison. You know, I mean, the thing is absolutely mind-blowing, the kind of brutality that the prison system has launched in the society, generally. It’s not the only force of repression, but it is one serious source of repression.

• (AG: you have said you can’t confront the American state spontaneously.) SJ: You always spontaneously react against the American state. You know, it is one of the most brutal ever in history. But on the other hand, you must organize against it. Spontaneity is not enough. Spontaneity is the basis on which you organize. And the question that C. L. R. James posed all those years ago is still our question: how do you organize in a way that does not prevent the spontaneity and the experience and the outpouring of all that you feel and think? You know, organization has tended to be a kind of repression, in spite of the fact that you’re going for liberation. And how do you form an organization that is not a repression, that is a discipline that demands accountability, but does not repress either your experience or your ideas or your spontaneous responses? That’s what we’ve been addressing for 40 years. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Wages for Housework Campaign, so I’ve spent 40 years of my life doing this. I’ve learned an enormous amount from others and with others.

• women’s struggles are labor politics, but they’re unwaged labor politics. And they’re not less important or more important but integral to the entire picture. There is waged work in the society, and there is unwaged work in the society, and they’re both absolutely crucial to the accumulation of capital and to its destruction.

• there was a distinction, a crucial distinction that kids have to make – kids, but teachers should help them – between rising out of poverty and destroying poverty. Do you use education to get out of it, or do you use education for all of us to get out of it?

• The relationships on which the whole society rests are in wreck condition, are in disastrous condition because women are going out to work. It’s not just a few minutes a day. It’s taking care of the relationships that are the foundation of our lives. That’s what women do. And when we can’t do that, when most of us can’t do that, we are either furious, resentful, or we begin to be uncaring ourselves. And that has happened to some women. It’s happened to all of us to some degree. That we don’t want to know about how the people that we would ordinarily have been taking care of, how they’re suffering. We don’t want to know. We can’t cope with the knowledge of the mess that people we love are in, as a result of the fact that we have no time to take care of them. I think there are really a lot of women in that situation. They call it the Sandwich Generation. They call it whatever they like. Any nice little name they give it, it’s definitely the suffering of the carer as well as those that they care for, obviously, which is why the carer is suffering.

• What keeps me motivated is that I want to enjoy my life, and the closest I can get to full enjoyment is to attack my enemies. And I find that, if I do it honestly and with others in a collective way, I have a good chance to know what’s happening in my own life. So my own life is not mystified, so I don’t believe the lies they tell me about what I think and what I feel or should feel and should think. That I really begin to see other members of the human race in the round rather than with the nonsense that all of us spew out from time to time when we don’t know what better to say. And that’s what really keeps me motivated. I have a very high opinion of my own life, and therefore, I want to use it in a way that is elevating to me but also to all those who are down here with us. I don’t know if I’ve said that very clearly, but you know, it’s something that I want for myself. To be part of this struggle is to be learning, all the time. And that’s more fun than anything I know, I mean, like anything. To learn what’s really going on is such a major thrill that it’s what really keeps me motivated.

• I think that that is what the teachers should be saying and doing. They should be spelling it out. They should be telling the parents, “If you want me to teach, fight for my wages, and fight for my time. Fight for the facilities, and fight for the children to have instruments to play in band and things like that, on school time, with school money.” You know, we want to give these children an education that really fits them to have a happy life, not fits them to be a repressed individual at the service of the state…I think that something similar has happened with nurses – and nurses are fighting to take care of patients…They’re not only fighting that they’re overworked and underpaid. They’re fighting so that they can take the proper care of the patients. You know, one of the nurses was complaining to me that his boss on the ward says that, “You spend too much time with the patients. If you have to go bandage a leg, just bandage a leg, but then you sit and talk with them, and that’s no good!” So, I think there’s a real crisis – this is in general – between us carers and those who exploit us. On the one hand, we want to care. But on the other hand, we don’t want that wish to care to be used against us as workers. And we have always to decide, as carers, as teachers, as nurses, as mothers, as neighbors, we have to decide how to defend our caring but not allow ourselves to be exploited because we have this “weakness,” and in fact, this vulnerability is the right word. We have to say, “You have to pay us to do the right thing.” And we don’t take the little bit that [either] we want to do the right thing, or we want to take the money. We want both. That’s really crucial, and it took a lot of years, I think, to be absolutely clear, to be able to say that in that succinct way because it’s very hard to figure out, if you are a carer, if your work is the health and well-being of other people, how to be dedicated to it but not exploited, not allow yourself to be exploited by it.

• 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, used as blurb for Sex Race and Class: a Selection of Writings

• 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, used as blurb for Sex Race and Class: a Selection of Writings

• One of the key political thinkers and activists of our times.
  • Marcus Rediker, quote used as blurb for Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet (2021)

• She is one of the few public intellectuals that engages with issues and people all over the world yet still remains connected to the grassroots. The writings and ideas of Selma James are as relevant now as they have ever been. Her solidarity knows no borders, her compassion excludes no sufferer.
  • Benjamin Zephaniah, part of quote used as blurb for Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet (2021)

• Global Women's Strike website
• The Guardian archive
• PM Press author page
• Goodreads page