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SEX RACE & €1 ASS

SELMA JAMES
there has been enough confusion generated when sex, race, and class have

confronted cach other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they
are separate entities is sclf-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not
separate, inseparable, s harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away
from class, vircually all chat remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian poll
tics of the white male metropolitan Lef. 1 hope to show in barest outline, first,
that the working class movement i something other than that Left have ever en
visioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete.
entity of sex or race and the torality of class is the greatest deterrent to working
class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.

In our pamphlet which Avis Brown so generously referred o, we tackled . .
the relation of women to capital and [the] kind of struggle we [can] effectively
wage to destroy it” (p.S), and draw throughout on the experience of the struggle
against capital by Black people. Beginning with the female (caste) experience,
we redefined class to include women. That redefinition was based on the un.
waged labour of the houserwife. We put i this way:

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the
wage, that is, that the foundation of capiralist socicty was the wage labour-

er and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor as

sumed by the organizations of the working class movement s that preciscly
through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage labourer been or-
ganized. This exploitation has been even more cffective because the lack
of awage hidic ... Where women are concerned their labour appears to be a
personalservice outside of capital. (p. 28)

Butif the relation of caste to class where women are concerned presents itselfin
a hidden, mystified form, this mystification s not unique to women. Before we
confront race, let us take an apparent diversion.

The least powerful in the society are our children, also umvaged in a wage lsbour
society. They were once (and in tribal society for example stil are) accepred as
an incegral part of the productive activity of the community. The work they did
was part of the total social abour and was acknowledged as such. Where capical

“The Colonyof the Colonized: nores o race, class and sex” Avis Brown, Race Today, June
1973, The wrte efers o The Power of Women an she Subverson of the Commanity by
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (Falling Wall Pres Besol 1972, 35 “brillanc” The
chid cdion was published 15 book i 1975. Unless otheruisesated, all quocations are
From Power f Women, 1975, (We werelace o learn that Avis Brown was a pscudonym for
A Sivansndan, man who is now head ofche Inseitute of Race Relscons, London) Ses,
Race and Clas,che replay o Avis Brown. was s published n Race Ty, January

is extending or has extended its rule, children are taken away from othersin the
community and foreed to go to schools, against which the number of rebels is
growing daily. Is their powerlessness a class question? Is their struggle against
school the classstruggle? We believe it is. Schools are institutions organized by
capital to achieve its purpose through and against the child.

Capical ... sent them to school not only because they are in the way of
others’ more “productive” labour or only o indoctrinate them. The rule
of capital through the wage compels every ablebodied person to function,
under the law of division of labour, and o function in ways that are if not
immediately then uldimately profitable to the expansion and extension of
the rule of capical. That, fundamentally, is the meaning of school. Where
children are concerned, their labour appears to be learning for their own
benefic. (p. 28)

So here are two sections of the working class whose activities, one in the home,
the other in the school, appear o be outside of the capitalist wage labour rela
tion because the workers themselves are wageless. In reality
facets of capitalist production and itsdivision of labour.

their aceivities are

One, housewives, are involved in the production and (what is the same thing)
reproduction of workers, what Mars calls lsbour power. They service those who
are daily destroyed by working for wages and who need to be daily renewed;
and they care for and discipline those who are being prepared to work when
they grow up.

The other, children, are those who from birth are the objects of this care and
discipline, who are trained in homes, in schools and in front of the elly to be
future workers. But this has two aspects.

In the first place, for labour power to be reproduced in the form of children,
these children must be coerced into accepring discipline and especially the dis
cipline of working, of being exploited in order o be able to cat. In addition,
however, they must be disciplined and trained to perform a cercain kind of
work. The labour that capital wants done is divided and each category parceled
out internationally as the life work, the destiny, the identity of specific sets of
workers. The phrase often used to describe this is the international division of
labour. We will say more of this lacer, but for now let the West Indian mother of
a seven-year-old sum up her son's education with precision: “They're choosing
the street sweepers now”
Those of us in the feminist movement who have torn the final veil away from
this international capitalist division of labour to expose women's and children's
class position, which was hidden by the parcicularity of their caste posicion,
learnt a good deal of this from the Black movement. It s not that it is written
down anywhere (though we discovered later it was, in what would seem to some.
a strange place). A mass movement teaches less by words than by the power it
exercises which, clearing away the debris of appearances, ell it like i is.

Just as the women's movement being “for” women and the rebellion of children
being “for” children, appears at irst not to be abou class,

‘The Black movement in the US. (and clsewhere) also began by adopting
what appeared to be only a caste position in opposition to the racism of
white male-dominated groups. Intellectuals in Harlem and Malcolm X,
tha great revolutionary, were both nationalists, both appeared to place co-
lour above class when the white Left were still chanting variations of “Black
and white unite and fight,” or “Negroes and Labour must join together”
The Black working class were able through this nationalism to redefine
class: overwhelmingly Black and Labour were synonymous (with no other
group was Labour as synonymous-except perhaps with women), the de-
mands of Blacks and the forms of struggle created by Blacks were the most
comprehensive working class struggle .. (p. 8)

Itis not then that the Black movement “wandered offinco the class struggle”
as Avis says. It was the class struggle and this took a while to sink into our con
sciousness. Why?

One reason is because some of us wore the blinkers of the white male Lef,
whether we knew it or not. According to them, if the struggle’ not in the fac
tory, s not the class struggle. The real bind was that this Left assured us they
spoke in the name of Marsism. They threatened that if we broke from them,
organizationally or policiclly, we were breaking with Marx and scientific social
ism. What gave us the boldness to break, fearless of the consequences, was the
power of the Black movement. We found chat redefining class went hand-in.
hand with rediscovering a Marx the Left would never understand.

There were decper reasons too why caste and class seemed contradicrory: It
appears often that the interests of Blacks are contradicted by the incerests of
whites, and it is similar with men and women. To grasp the class interest when
there scems not one but two, three, fou, cach contradicting the other,is one of
the most difficult revolutionary tasks, in theory and practice, that confront us.
Another source of confusion is that not all women, children or Black men are.
working class. Thisis only to say that within the movements which these form
are layers whose struggle tends o be aimed at moving up in the capitalst hi
erarchy racher than at destroying it. And so within cach movement there is a
struggle about which class interest the movement will serve. But this s the his
tory also of white male workers' movements. There is no class “puric
in shop Roor organizations. The struggle by workers against organizations they
formed there and in the society generally - trade unions, Labour parties, ecc. - is
the class struggle.

Les put the relation of caste to class another way. The word “culture” is often
used to show that class concepts are narrow, philistine, inhuman. Exactly the
opposite i the case. A national culture which has evolved over decades or cen:
turies may appear to deny tha society's relacion to international capicalism. It
i a subject too wide to go into decply here but one basic point can be quickly
dlarified

The life-seyle unique to themselves which a people develop once they are en.
meshed by capicalism, in response to and in rebellion against it, cannot be un
derstood atall excepe s the rocaliy of heir capitalis lves. To delimit culture is
0 reduce it to a decoration of daily lif

Cultare is plays and poctry about the
exploited; ceasing to wear mini-skirts and taking to trousers instead; the clash
between the soul of Black Baptism and the guilt and sin of white Protestantism.
Culture is also the shrill of the alarm clock that rings ac 6.m. when a Black
woman in London wakes her children to get them ready for the baby minder.
Culture is how cold she fecls at the bus stop and then how ho in the crowded
bus. Culeure is how you feel on Monday morning at eight when you clock in,
wishing it was Friday, wishing your life away. Culture s the speed of the line o
the weight and smell of dirty hospical sheets, and you meanwhile thinking what
to make for tea that night. Culture is making the tea while your man watches
the news on the telly.

And culture is an “irrational woman” walking out of the kitchen ino the sitting
r00m and without a word turning off the telly “for no reason atall”

2 For an analyss of the antagonisti relrionship berween workers and trade unions e .
James, Women, The Unions and Work, or what i not o b done, s published in 1972,
republished with anew Postsripe, Falling Wall Press, Brsol, 1976.

3 For the besedemystfcaion of culcue L know which shows, for example how West Indian
eickec has carred n o hear acial and clss conflcts, sce C. LR James, Beyond « Bound:
ar, Hutchinson, London. 1963.

From where does this culcure spring which is so different from a man's f you are
awoman and different too from a white woman's if you are a Black woman? Is it
ausiliary to the class struggle (as the white Left has it) oris it more fundamental
o the class struggle (as Black nationalists and radical feminists have it) because
iis special to your sex, your race, your age, your nationality and the moment in
time when you are these things?

Our identity, our social roles, the way we are seen, appears to be disconnected
from our capitalist functions. To be liberated from them (or through them) ap
pears to be independent from our liberation from capicalist wage slavery. In my.
view, identity-caste-is the very substance of clas.

Here is the “strange place” where we found the key to the relation of class to
caste written down most succinedly. Here is where the international division of
labour is posed as power relationships within the working class. It is Volume [
of Marx’s Capital.

Manufacture ... develops a hierarchy of labour powers, to which there cor-
responds a sale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual labourers are
appropriated and annexed for lfe by a limited function; on the other hand,
the various operations of the hierarchy are parceled out among the labour-

ers according to both their natural and their acquired capabilicies. (Mos

cow 1958, p. 349)

In two sentences is laid out the deep material connection between racism, sex-
ism, national chauvinism and the chauvinism of the gencrations who are work-
ing for wages against children and old age pensioners who are wageless, who are
dependents.

Ahierarchy of labour powers and scale of wages to correspond. Racism and sex-

ism training us to develop and acquire certain capabilicies at the expense of all
others. Then these acquired capabilicis are taken to be our nature and fix our
functions for life, and fix also che quality of our mutual relations. So planting
cane or teais not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for
men and beating children is not violence. Race, sex, age, nation, cach an indis

pensable clement of the international division of labour. Our feminism bases it

selfon a hitherto invisiblestratum of the hierarchy of Labour powers - the housewife
~to which there corresponds no wage at all

To proceed on the basis of a hicrarchical structure among waged and unwaged
slavery s not, as Avis accuses the working class of doing, “concentrating . .
exclusively on the economic decerminants of the class struggle.” The work you
do and the wages you receive are not merely “cconomic” but social determi:
nants, determinants of social power. Itis not the working class but organizations
which claim to be of and for that class which reduce the continual struggle for
social power by that class into “cconomic determinants™greater capitalist con
ol for a pittance more a week. Wage rises that unions negotiate often turn out
0 be standstills or even cuts, cither through inflation or through more intense
exploitation (often in the form of productivity deals) which more than pay the
capitalist back for the risc. And s0 people assume that this was the intention of
workers in demanding, for example, more wages, more money, more “universal
social power in the words of Marx.

The social power relations of the sexes, races, nations and generations are pre.
ciscly,then, particularized forms of clas relations. These power relations within
the working class weaken us in the power struggle between the classes. They are
the particularized forms of indirect rule, one section of the class colonizing an
other and through this capical imposingits own will on usall. One of the reasons
why these so-called working class organizations have been able so to mediate.
the struggle s that we have, internationally, allowed them to isolate “the work-
ing class” which they identify as white, male and over 21, from the rest of us.
‘The unskilled white male worker, an exploited human being who is increasingly.
disconnected from capital’ perspective for him to work, to vote, to participate.
in s society; he also, racist and sexist though he is, recognizes himself as the
victim of these organizations. But housewives, Blacks, young people, workers
from the Third World, excluded from the definition of clas, have been told that
their confrontation with the white male power structure in the metropolis is
an “exoric hiscorical accident” Divided by the capicalist organization of socicty
into factory, office, school, plantation, home and street, we are divided to0 by
the very institutions which claim to represent our struggle collectively as a lass.

In the metropolis, the Black movement was the first section of the class mas
sively to take its autonomy from these organizations, and to break away from
the containment of the struggle only in the factory. When Black workers burn
the centre of a city, however, white Left eyes, especially if they are trade union
eyes,sec race, not class.

The women's movement was the next major movement of the class in the me-
tropolis to find for itself a power base outside the factory as well as in ic. Like
the Black movement before if,to be organizationally autonomous of capital and

its insticutions, women and heir movement had also to be autonomous of that

part of the “hicrarchy of labour powers” which capital used specifically against
them, For Blacks it was whites. For women it was men. For Black women it is
boch,

Strange to chink that even today, when confronted with the autonomy of the
Black movement o the autonomy of the women's movement, there are those
who talk about this “dividing the workingclass” Strange indeed when our expe:
rience has told us that in order for the working class to unite in spite of the divi
sions which are inherent in its very structure-factory versus plantation versus
home versus schools-those at the lowest levels of the hicrarchy must themselves
find the key to their weakness, must themselves find the strategy which will at
tack that point and shatter it, must themselves find their own modes of struggle.

The Black movement has not in our view “integrated into capitalism’s plural
socicty” (though many of its “leaders” have), it has not “been subsumed to
white working class strategy” (Here I think Avis is confusing white working
class struggle with trade union/Labour party strategy. They are mortal enemics,
yet they are often taken as identical ) The Black movement has, on the conrary,
in the United States challenged and continues to challenge the most powerful
capitalist State in the world. The most powerful at home and abroad. When it
burnt down the centres of that metropolis and challenged all constituted au:
thority, it made a way for the rest of the working class everywhere to move in
its own specific interests. We women moved. This is neither an accident nor the
first time events have moved in this sequence.

It is not an accident because when constituted power was confronted, a new
possibilty opened for all women. For example, the daughters of men to whom
was delegated some of this power saw through the noble mask of education,
medicine and the law for which their mothers had sacrificed their lives. Oh yes,
marriage to a man with a good salary would be rewarded by a finc house to be
imprisoned in, and even a Black servant; they would have privilege for as long
as they were attached to that salary which was no their own. But power would
remain in the hands of the white male power structure. They had to renounce
the privilege even to strike out for power. Many did. On the tide of working class
power which the Black movement had expressed in the streets, and all women
expressed in the day-to-day rebellion in the home, the women's movement came.
into being,

Itis not e firs time cither that a women's movement received ics impetus from
the exercise of power by Black people. The Black slave who formed the Abo
litionist Movement and organized the Underground Railroad for the escape
0 the North also gave white women-and again the more privileged of them-a
chance, an occasion to transcend the limitations in which the female personali

tywas imprisoned. Women, trained always to do for others, lef their homes not
o e themselves-that would have been outrageous-but to free “the slave” They
were encouraged by Black women, ex-slaves like Sojourner Truth, who suffered
because, being women, they had been the breeders of labour power on the plan.

‘ation. But once those white women had taken their firs decisive step out of the
feminine mould, they confronted more sharply their own situation. They had
to defend their right, as women, to speak in public against slavery. They were
refused, for example, scating at the Abolitionist conference of 1840 in London
because they were women. By 1848 at Sencea Falls, New York, they called their
‘own conference, for women's rights. There was a male speaker. He was a leading
Abolicionist. He had been a slave. His name was Frederick Douglass.

And when young white women headed South on the Freedom Ride buses in
the carly 60s of this century and discovered that their male (white and Black)
comrades had a special place for them in the hierarchy of struggle, as capital had
in the hierarchy of labour power, history repeated itself-almost. This ime it was
not for the vote but for a very different goal that they formed a movement. It
was amovement for liberation.

The parallels that are drawn between the Black and women’s movements can
always turn into an 11-plus: who is more exploited? Our purpose here is not
parallels. We are sceking to describe tha complex interweaving of forces which
i the working class; we are secking to break down the power relations among us
‘on which is based the hierarchical rule of international capital. For no man can
represent us as women any more than whites can speak about and themselves
end the Black experience. Nor do we seck to convince men of our feminism.
Ultimately they will be “convinced” by our power. We offer them what we offer
the most privileged women: power over their enemics. The price is an end to
their privilege over us.

The strategy of feminist class struggle is, as we have said, based on the wage
less woman in the home. Whether she also works for wages outside the home,
her labour of producing and reproducing the working class weighs her down,
weakens her capacity to struggle-she doesn't even have time. Her position in
the wage structure s low especially but not onlyif she is Black. And even if she
is relatively well placed in the hierarchy of labour powers (rare enough!), she
remains defined asa sexual object of men. Why? Because as long s most women
are housewives part of whose function in reproducing labour power s to be the
10

sexual object of men, no woman can escape that identity. We demand wages
for the work we do in the home. And that demand for a wage from the State
is,first, a demand to be autonomous of men on whom we are now dependent.
Secondly, we demand money without working out of the home, and open for
the first time the possibilicy of refusing forced labour in the factories and in the
home tsclf.

Itis here in chis strategy that the lines berween the revolutionary Black and the
revolutionary feminist movements begin to blur. This perspective s founded on
the least powerful-the wageless. Reinforcing capical’s international division of
labour s a standing army of unemployed who can be shunted from industry to
industry, from country to country. The Third World is the most massive repos

tory of this industrial reserve army. (The second most massive s the kitchen in
the metropolis.) Port of Spain, Calcutta, Algiers, the Mexican towns south of
the US border are the labour power for shitwork in Paris, London, Frankfurc
and the farms of California and Florida. What is their role in the revolution?
How can the wageless struggle withou the lever of the wage and the factory?
We do not pose the answers-we can't. But we pose the questions in a way which
assumes that the unemployed have not to go to work in order to subvert capital

Houserwives working without a pay packet in the home may also have a job ou
side of their homes. The subordination of the wage of the man in the home and
the subordinating nature of that labour weaken the woman wherever else she is
working, and regardless of race. Here is the basis for Black and white women
0 act together, “supported” or “unsupported; not because the antagonism of
race is overcome, but because we both need the autonomy that the wage and the
struggle for the wage can bring. Black women will know in what organizations
(with Black men, with white women, with neither) to make that struggle. No
one else can ko

We don't agree with Avis that “the Black American struggle failed to fulfill its
potential as a revolutionary vanguard ... if by *vanguard" is mean the basic
propellant of class struggle in a particular historical situation. It has used the
“specificity of ics cxperience™-as a nation and as a class both at once-to redefine
class and the class struggle itself. Perhaps the theoreticians have not, but then
they must never be confused with the movement. Only as a vanguard could that
struggle have begun to clarify the central problem of our age, the organizational
unity of the working class internationally as we now perceive and define it.
Itis widely presumed that the Vanguard Party on the Leninist model embodies
that organizational unity: Since the Leninist model assumes a vanguard express

ing the otal class interest, it bears no relation to the reality we have been de

scribing, where no one scction of the class can express the experience and inter-
est of, and pursuc the struggle for, any other section. The formal organizational
expression of a general class strategy does not yet anywhere exist

Let me quote finally from a letcer written against one of the organizations of
the ltalian extra-parliamentary Left who, when we had a feminist symposium in
Rome last year and excluded men, called us fascists and actacked us physically.

The eraditional attack on the immigrant worker, especially but not
exclusively if he or she is Black (or Southern Iralian), is that her presence
threatens the gains of the native working class. Exactly the same is said
about women in relation to men. The anti-racit (i ationalist and
anti-sexis) point of view-the point of view, that i, of struggle-is o discover
the organizational weakness which permits the most powerful scctions of
the class to be divided from the less powerful, thereby allowing capical to
play on this division, defeating us. The question is,in fact, one of the basic
questions which the class faces today. Where Lenin divided the class be-
tween the advanced and the backward, a subjective division, we sce the di
vision along the lines of capitalist organization, the more powerful and the
less powerful. It i the experience of the less powerful that when workers in
astronger position (that is, men with a wage in relation to women without
one, or whites with 2 higher wage than Blacks) gain a “victory:” it may not
be avictory for the weaker and even may represent a defeat for both. For in
the disparity of power within the classis precisely the strength of capital.

i

How the working class will ultimately unite organizationally, we don't know: We
do know that up to now many of us have been told to forget our own needs in
some wider interest which was never wide enough to include us. And so we have
learne by bitter experience that nothing unified and revolutionary will be formed.
wntil cach section of the exploited will have made its own autonomous power felr.

Power to che sisters and therefore to the class!

4 Froma lecer by Lotea Feminisa and the Incrnational Feminise Colleciv, reprnced in
LOffnsiva, Musoln, Turin, 1972 (pp. 18-19). L wrote the paragraph quoted here.
NOTHING UNIFIED & REVOLUTIONARY
WILL BE FORMED UNTIL EACH SECTION
OF THE EXPLOITED WILL HAVE MADE
ITS OWN AUTONOMOUS POWER FELT.

Brooklyn's Selma James is the founder of the Incernational
Wages for Housework Campaign and coordinator of the
Global Women's Serike. This text, irse published in 1973,
quickly became a classic of anti-racist women's movement, It
addresses the economic basis of the power relations within the
working class internationally

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