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This book appears in the following booklists

• Feminism Worldwide
• Housework & Domestic Labour
• Anti-Racism
• Activism & Resistance
• Feminism
• Equality & Anti-Oppression
• Women's Activism
• Class

in categories:Feminism & Women, Men & Masculinity, Work & Workers Rights, Anti-Racism, Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, Politics & Philosophy, Changing the World, Anti-Capitalism & Global Inequality, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuality & Transgender, Disability, Society, Welfare, Justice & the State,

Sex, Race & Class, The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011

by Selma James
£14.95   paperback  PM Press (2012)

Men and women work. But they labor under conditions of coercion. That fact is in force in and out of the home. Both settings are the concern of Selma James, 81, Brooklyn-bred in a Jewish-American, leftist working-class family, and a self-defined activist who writes about the causes and outcomes of a global, gender division of labor.
 
James urges us to think more clearly about the meanings and motives of “unwaged labor”. using this term for the daily work that females do for the aged, children, and adults. It’s uncounted in national data. However, people of all backgrounds count on such female work in ways big and small. In varied contexts and at many venues, including the UN, James’s output over six decades shines with radical clarity on the economy, humanity and society. Throughout, she stresses the crucial need to advance a class formation that politically privileges the majority of humanity. Against this backdrop, some people get wages for their work. Then again, some people don’t. Why is this so? How does the wage question shape personal and political relations among and between men and women in the First and Third Worlds?
 
James explains more fully her position in a 1972 book, excerpted in her current collection of writings, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, written with co-author Maria Dalla Costa. The same year James launched the International Wages for Housework Campaign, to compel governments to direct some of the surplus product (profits from waged workers sustained by unpaid female labor) from capitalist employers to unwaged housewives. We read also about her reasons for playing a part in the emergence of the Global Women’s Strike in 2000. Its mission, in sum, is to force governing elites to invest in “Caring not Killing.” James also writes about her working with prostitutes and sex workers, occupying a church.
 
She also works with revolutionaries in Venezuela where women play an enormous role in and out of their homes, elevating the well being of their communities. An anti-Zionist, James writes of her work with like-minded people opposed to the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
 
This is a stimulating collection of writing about 60 years of practice and thought on how to build a better world for human beings. In it she clarifies ten knotty issues which sprout from the troubling divisions that alienate us from each other, our work and ourselves, in words that people can grasp.

ISBN 13: 9780850366501 | ISBN 10: 085036650X