Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning by Selma James

Author:Selma James [James, Selma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Government, Communism & Socialism, Social Science, Gender Studies, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9781604867114
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

1 Introduction to Power of Women, 10.

2 Such reliance on others is a tradition in some societies. The Indian philosopher Patanjali, for example, talks about the need for ongoing “reliable testimony” in order to make valid judgments. Marx, I think, gives us “reliable testimony.”

3 We won and mothers kept the money. For the history of the campaign that won Family Allowance in the UK, see the introductory essay by S. Fleming in The Disinherited Family by Eleanor Rathbone (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1986).

4 See Hookers in the House of the Lord, page 110 in this volume.

5 This is a view popular with separatists: that is, feminists who believe that men—and sometimes women who are with men, including with male children—are the enemy. What follows from separatism is often an attack on all men in theory, and in practice—because they have the least perks and power to bestow—on Black, Third World, and working-class men.

6 I have not mentioned welfare in this catalogue because in the United States the massive women’s movement, led by Black single mothers for wages for housework in the form of welfare, was virtually ignored by the new Women’s Liberation Movement, in the same way as its proabortion wing at first ignored the fight against forced sterilization. (Much the same was true in Britain, although here women in the Claimants’ Unions pressed their case in Women’s Liberation, with some success.)

7 Capital and its State have their own reasons for promoting the Left definition of the “working class.” To them, “Small [less numerous and therefore less powerful] is beautiful” is an extremely convenient view of the working class. Thus they try to convince almost everyone that s/he is “middle-class.” But why do we believe it? Since (thanks to the Left) “working class” implies downtrodden, futureless, backward victims, and few of us wants to see ourselves in that defeated way, we often find the middle-class label necessary to self-respect.

8 The Eastern European regimes were still in power in 1983.

9 Readers should know that I am using my own language except where I say otherwise in order for the analysis to be accessible and quickly graspable. While my exposition of Marx’s theory of value is not inaccurate, it is of course incomplete: my aim is merely to make the basic connection between unwaged “women’s work” and the waged working day. The reader who goes to chapters 4–9 of Capital, 1, will be richly rewarded. Marx himself connects the reproduction of labor power directly with the reproduction of capital in chapter 23. “By converting part of his capital into labor-power, the capitalist…kills two birds with one stone. He profits not only by what he receives from the worker, but also by what he gives him. The capital given in return for labor-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual

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