Sex, Race, and Class

Selma James
Foreword by Marcus Rediker
Introduction by Nina López

Feminism / Literary Nonfiction

Selma James’ “Sex, Race, and Class”offers enduring meditations on themes, issues, and histories that we directly confront in our movements today. James’ formulations have always been deeply internationalist, concerned with the circulation of struggles globally and the challenge of uniting struggles despite deep racial and patriarchal divisions in the planetary body of working people. She powerfully reminds us that the force of the capitalist wage as a significant source of these divisions and fused a Marxist reading of the work process to its instantiations and entrenchments in systems of domination of race, gender, and imperialism.

Her political training and organizational experience spans decades and continents—first in the 1950s with her late husband C.L.R. James in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and then with the Wages For Housework campaign, founded in Padova July 1972 by a gathering of women who formed the International Feminist Collective. Throughout, she has relied on the shared analysis and political experiences of comrades networked across the United States, Europe, and much of the decolonizing world, to set out a new political perspective that redefined the working class to include sectors previously dismissed as “marginal.”

In order to unite disparate sectors of the planetary working class—understood in its widest sense—beyond the division of the wage, thier 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.