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

(Paperback)

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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 racewhatever 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 Jamess work with a focus on more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of two of CLR Jamess 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 mens 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.

Reviews

"One of the most important figures in the new way of thinking in the 1970s and 1980s was Selma James. James's Marx and Feminism deserves to be considered one of the great feminist contributions to Marxist thought."
--Monthly Review

". . . An intellectually ambitious attempt to synthesize Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism, not with the usual sellotaped hyphenations."
--Jenny Turner, London Review of Books

"In an era where women are encouraged to 'lean in' to capitalism and power, Sex, Race and Class provides a much-needed reminder that house work and care work are work--and deserve to be recognized and compensated as such. James not only details women's campaigns that might otherwise be forgotten, but provides a valuable blueprint for organizing towards a truly liberated society."
--Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

"When Selma James speaks, I listen. When she writes, I read. She has been a crucial part of my reeducation for decades. 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, poet, writer, lyricist, musician, and naughty boy

Author Bio

Selma James is a women's rights and antiracist campaigner and author. She cofounded the International Wages for Housework Campaign and helped launch the Global Women's Strike. She was the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes and is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. She coauthored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Nina Lpez is the joint coordinator of the Global Women's Strike. Her writings and edited volumes include: Prostitute Women and AIDS: Resisting the Virus of Repression and Some Mother's Daughter: The Hidden Movement of Prostitute Women against Violence. Margaret Prescod, author of Black Women Bringing It All Back Home, is coordinator of Women of Color in the Global Women's Strike and an award-winning journalist on Pacifica Radio.