Selma James

Socialist activist

Selma Deitch was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. As a young woman, she worked in factories, and then as a full-time housewife and mother. At the age of 15, she joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency, one of whose three leaders was C. L. R. James.

In 1952, she wrote the classic A Woman’s Place, first published as a column in Correspondence, a bi-weekly newspaper written and edited by its readers with an audience of mainly working-class people. Unusually at the time, the newspaper had pages dedicated to giving women, young people and Black people an autonomous voice. She was a regular columnist and edited the Women's Page. In 1955, she came to England to marry C.L.R. James, who had been deported from the United States during the McCarthy period. They were together for 25 years, and were close political colleagues.

From 1958 to 1962, she lived in Trinidad, where, with her husband, she was active in the movement for West Indian independence and federation. Returning to Britain after independence, she became the first organising secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in 1965, and a founding member of the Black Regional Action Movement and editor of its journal in 1969.

Wages for housework

In 1972, the publication The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa) launched the "domestic labour debate" by spelling out how housework and other caring work women do outside of the market produces the whole working class, thus the market economy, based on those workers, is built on women's unwaged work. The 1983 publication of James's Marx and Feminism broke with established Marxist theory by providing a reading of Marx's Capital from the point of view of women and of unwaged work.

In 1972, James founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, which demands money from the State for the unwaged work in the home and in the community. A raging debate followed about whether caring full-time was "work" or a "role" — and whether it should be compensated with a wage. James is the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes, which campaigns for decriminalisation as well as viable economic alternatives to prostitution.

Beginning in 1985, she co-ordinated the International Women Count Network, which won the UN decision where governments agreed to measure and value unwaged work in national statistics. Legislation on this has since been introduced in Trinidad & Tobago and Spain, and time-use surveys and other research are under way in many countries. In Venezuela, Article 88 of the Constitution recognises work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces wealth and social welfare, and entitles housewives to social security.

Recent activity

Since 2000, James has been international coordinator of the Global Women's Strike, a network of grassroots women, bringing together actions and initiatives in many countries. The strike demands that society "Invest in Caring Not Killing", and that military budgets be returned to the community starting with women, the main carers everywhere. She has been working with the Venezuelan Revolution since 2002.

She is a founder of the Crossroads Women's Centre in Kentish Town, London, and is general editor of Crossroads Books. She lectures in the UK, the US, and other countries on a wide range of topics, including "Sex, Race, & Class", "What the Marxists Never Told Us About Marx", "The Internationalist Jewish Tradition", "Rediscovering Nyerere's Tanzania", "CLR James as a political organizer", and "Jean Rhys: Jumping to Tia".

In April 2008, James (along with Edinburgh-based couple Ralph and Noreen Ibbott, both members of the Britain Tanzania Society in the 1960s), visited Edinburgh on the anniversary of Tanzania Muungano Day, which falls on April 26. She gave a talk in a session hosted by the Tanzania Edinburgh Community Association (TzECA) on Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa (African socialism) in the 1960s in Tanzania with reference to the subject of Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), and the Tanzania Arusha Declaration. RDA traces its roots to the original Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), which was registered in the early 1960s when, encouraged by Julius Nyerere the first President of Tanzania, following Independence a number of communal villages joined together and organised themselves into what became known as the Ujamaa villages. The driving force behind the Association was Ntimbanjayo Millinga, who was the secretary of the local branch of the Tanzanian African National Union Youth League, and he was supported by Ralph Ibbott, an English quantity surveyor who acted as an advisor and agreed to live and work with his family in the village of Litowa. The session took place at the "Waverley Care Solas" Abbey Mount.

James is a founder member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and, in May 2008, signed the Letter of British Jews on 60th anniversary of Israel published in The Guardian, explaining why she would not celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary.

In July 2015, James endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.

Works