Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet

Description

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—whatever else they do. This work goes on almost unnoticed everywhere, in every culture. It is not prioritized economically, politically, or socially, and women are discriminated against and impoverished for doing it. This much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class, compiles several decades of James’s work with a focus on more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of two of CLR James’s masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership with him. Her experience in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence is reflected in her introduction to Ujamaa, the socialism that Tanzanian villagers built, and in her work with Guyana, Haiti, and Venezuela. Steeped in the tradition of Marx urging the need for a “practical movement,” James recounts the unusual history of how autonomous organizations formed within the International Wages for Housework Campaign and reshaped it. Women of colour, queer women, sex workers, women with disabilities … each independent but mutually accountable (including to the men’s network with whom they work) as they confront sexism, racism, deportation, rape, and other violence. James makes the powerful argument that the struggle for climate justice can draw on all the movements people have formed to refuse exploitation and to end the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. There is one continuum between the care and protection of people and of the planet. The care income she campaigns for prioritizes both. Our time is now. Cover Title page Copyright Contents Introduction From Wages for Housework to a Care Income (1977–2020) Houston: Equality Begins with Money Time Off for Women Articles in the Media How Women’s Work Has Been Pushed Up the US Political Agenda What if Women Want to Look After Their Children Themselves, Liz Truss? From Welfare to Wages, Women Fight Back against the Uncaring Market When Women Disappoint Child Benefit Has Been Changing Lives for 70 Years. Let’s Not Forget the Woman Behind It What Women Want 2.0: Equal Pay Decades After Iceland’s “Day Off,” Our Women’s Strike Is Stronger Than Ever The Crucial Work That Women Do Is Often Overlooked Norway: Equal—At What Price? Working Life and Family Life from an Ethnic Minority Perspective France: Housework Must Be Waged—excerpts What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in aJ ob Like This? A Comparison between Sex Work and Other Jobs Commonly Done by Women An Income to Care for People and Planet How Some of Our Network See the Care Income We Are All Campaigning For A Care Income Now! Chávez, Nyerere, Aristide versus Thatcher (2013–2018) Hugo Chávez Knew That His Revolution Depended on Women Thatcherism Hasn’t Failed: It Has Infected All Our Politics Haiti: NGO Crimes Go Far beyond Oxfam Ujamaa: The Hidden Story of Tanzania’s Socialist Villages (2014) Introduction The Struggle of Prisoners (2014–2020) Prisoners Celebrate the Power of Their United Struggle Women Prisoners: Housework Inside Revisiting the Work of CLR James (2017–2019) The Black Jacobins, Past and Present Confronting Imperial Boundaries Beyond Boundaries—A Talk with Selma James on Her Political Activities and Years with CLR James The Grassroots Labour Movement That Shook Britain (2015–2020) Introduction Yvette Cooper Supported Sexist Austerity; Jeremy Corbyn Has Always Opposed It On Winning with Corbyn Standing with Palestinians We Are in the Midst of an Anti-Left Witch-Hunt Why the Movement Lost the Election and What Followed Sex, Race, Class . . . and Autonomy (2020) The Organizational Strategy of Autonomy Andaiye: The Uses of Autonomy Unlocking the Power of the Movement Index About the Authors