CLR James: A Boundary that broke down barriers

C.L.R. James

by Selma James, The Mail & Guardian

Fifty years ago, after a March in the United Kingdom as cold as the one just gone, my husband CLR James's semiautobiographical Beyond a Boundary appeared as the cricket season opened. Reviews were favourable but none even approached the incomparable (and antiracist) John Arlott's in Wisden, "the cricketers' Bible".

Care Work and the Power of Women: An Interview with Selma James

by Julie McIntyre, Viewpoint Magazine, 19 March 2012

In their 1972 pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa presented an original and influential analysis of “unwaged work.” This concept, which identified the care work that women do in the home as an essential element of the reproduction of capitalism, opened the door to powerful new forms of struggle among working class women and men. James founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, based on the demand that women should be paid for their round-the-clock care work, since it reproduces labor-power day after day.

Sex, Race and Class

by Selma James, 1973, Libcom

 There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.