Sunday – 03.18.12 – Selma James – Power to the Sisters and therefore to the Class – Sex, Race, and Class; and Current Perspectives on Movements – Plus an evening together
Comments Off on Sunday – 03.18.12 – Selma James – Power to the Sisters and therefore to the Class – Sex, Race, and Class; and Current Perspectives on Movements – Plus an evening togetherSunday – 03.18.12 – Selma James – Power to the Sisters and therefore to the Class – Sex, Race, and Class; and Current Perspectives on Movements – Plus an evening together
Contents:
0. Short Introduction
1. Introduction (Part I – with Selma James)
2. Introduction (Part II – with more friends)
3. Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning
4. Selma James
5. Brecht Forum
6. Common Notions
7. Related Text
8. Useful Links
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0. Short Intro
Part I: a talk with Selma James
Part II: book sharing and informal gathering
This weekend Left Forum arrives in New York. Many friends will be involved, organizing, speaking, taking part in different discussions. There are too many discussions to name, but because of preparations for the General Strike in May, we would like to point out a discussion on the General Strike, organized with Gayatri Spivak and other friends.
In the early evening, we would like to invite everyone for two connected programs at 16 Beaver.
The first will be a conversation with Selma James at 5pm. We are very much looking forward to this event and you will find more notes below.
The second part of the evening will be a more informal gathering and book sharing. It will be nice if people bring their favorite things to eat or drink to share in addition to books they may want to exchange or give away. Please note food in our ‘neighborhood’ can be limited in selection and not so great.
We hope you will join us.
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1. Introduction (Part I)
What: A talk with Selma James
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Sunday, March 18 at 5pm
Who: Free and open to all
This March, both Women’s history month, and the six month anniversary of the inauguration of Occupy Wall Street on September 17th, we gather to reflect and interpret not the static world, but the world in motion. We find ourselves hot-wired into a world newly electrified by a proliferation of mass struggles against capitalist and state power—a world that has reoriented our political imagination, recatalyzed a collective search for autonomy from the deepest divisions in our lives and the knots of power that benefit from our subdivision and subordination, and have realigned us with movements worldwide that daily challenge the power balance between the governed and entrenched oligarchies.
This Sunday, March 18th, we have the extraordinary opportunity to meet and discuss with Selma James (b. 1930), author of the recently published “Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011.” James has originated enduring meditations on themes, issues, and histories that we directly confront in our movements today. Her formulations have always been deeply internationalist, concerned with the circulation of struggles globally and the challenge of uniting struggles despite deep racial and patriarchal divisions in the planetary body of working people. She powerfully identified the force of the capitalist wage as a significant source of these divisions, and fused a Marxist reading of the work process to its instantiations and entrenchments in systems of domination of race, gender, and international imperialism. Her organizational experience, first with CLR James in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and then the International Wages for Housework campaign, relied on the shared analysis and labor of comrades networked across the U.S., Europe, and much of the decolonizing world, to develop a perspective that aimed to unite disparate sectors of the planetary working class understood in its widest sense beyond the division of the wage—the consequence was a political sensibility that could navigate the contours of struggles of the class against the imposition of work in an expansive arena that included industrial workers, housewives, students, sex workers, as well as the marginalized and dispossessed, and made visible the scenes of revolt against racial and gendered domination across the social factory, kitchen, bedroom, classroom, streets, impoverished ghettos of both the metropolis and the wastelands of the so-called periphery.
Her starting point and organizational goal was autonomy. That everyday life was teeming with instances of “self-activity” (a focus she shared with her late husband CLR James, influenced by the political work of George Rawick)—of diverse and sometimes hidden acts of derision, refusal, and sabotage in the quest for emancipation from capital’s disciplinary mechanisms written across the social fabric—was a methodological given in the analysis of class struggle. Selma James’ reference point for “politics” has long been the realm of self-expression and self-organization of the most subordinate and excluded, seeing politics as the power to speak for ones self, to stand up to ones “leaders” and defend ones own organizations from co-optation by these hierarchies and expropriations of power.
James’ sharp focus on the question of alliance resolutely starts with the recognition of powerful divisions and hierarchies based in the work process but thoroughly connected to the community and social field ordered and disordered along racial, gender, and national stratifications. How to break with existing power-relations and simultaneously draw power from past, inherited, current, and ongoing experiences of organizing for our autonomous power? Her experiences as an organizer, researcher, and writer in numerous international networks since the 1950s, as well as her “perspective of winning” speaks directly to this question as well as the profound issues and challenges confronting our organizing initiatives today. Please join us for a discussion—historical, political, and personal— with Selma James as we draw out lessons for politics today on the occasion of her new publication “Sex, Race, and Class.”
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2. Introduction (Part II)
What: Sharing Food, Books, Company, Ideas
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Sunday, March 18 at 8pm
Who: Free and open to all
Following Selma’s talk, we hope to create a situation where different people can meet and have time to speak more casually.
Marina Sitrin has suggested as one point of commoning for the evening, to bring books we would like to share with others.
The idea goes something like this:
Too often ideas are bought and sold, and while we support all the independent publishers as much as we can, we also want to create a space where the written word can be shared free. So we invite people to bring books, pamphlets and journals to share, exchange, and give away. Please bring extra material you might have. We will have a table for free ideas in writing.
We would also invite people to not only share books or texts they love, but to also bring foods or drinks as it may have been a long day for some, so replenishing ourselves with food will also be a nice way to conclude the weekend.
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3. Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning
In 1972 Selma James set out a new political perspective. Her starting point was the millions of unwaged women who, working in the home and on the land, were not seen as “workers” and their struggles viewed as outside of the class struggle. Based on her political training in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, founded by her late husband C.L.R. James, on movement experience South and North, and on a respectful study of Marx, she redefined the working class to include sectors previously dismissed as “marginal.”
For James, the class struggle presents itself as the conflict between the reproduction and survival of the human race, and the domination of the market with its exploitation, wars, and ecological devastation. She sums up her strategy for change as “Invest in Caring not Killing.”
PM Press has published a selection of James’ writings, spanning six decades, that trace the development of this perspective in the course of building an international campaigning network. It includes the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which launched the “domestic labor debate,” the exciting Hookers in the House of the Lord which describes a church occupation by sex workers, an incisive review of the C.L.R. James masterpiece The Black Jacobins, a reappraisal of the novels of Jean Rhys and of the leadership of Julius Nyerere, the groundbreaking Marx and Feminism, and “What the Marxists Never Told Us About Marx,” published for the first time.
Selma James’ writing is lucid and without jargon. The ideas, never abstract, spring from the experience of organizing, from trying to make sense of the successes and the setbacks, and from the need to find a way forward.
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4. Selma James
Selma James is a women’s rights and anti-racist campaigner and author. >From 1958 to 1962 she worked with C.L.R. James in the movement for West Indian federation and independence. In 1972 she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 helped launch the Global Women’s Strike whose strategy for change is “Invest in Caring not Killing”. She coined the word “unwaged” which has since entered the English language. In the 1970s she was the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. She co-authored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which launched the “domestic labour debate.” Other publications include A Woman’s Place (1952), Women, the Unions and Work, or what is not to be done (1972), Sex, Race and Class (1974), Wageless of the World (1974), The Rapist Who Pays the Rent (1982), The Ladies and the Mammies—Jane Austen and Jean Rhys(1983), Marx and Feminism (1983), Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983), Strangers & Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration (1985), The Global Kitchen—the Case for Counting Unwaged Work (1985 and 1995), and The Milk of Human Kindness—Defending Breastfeeding from the AIDS Industry and the Global Market (2005).
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5. Brecht Forum
Since this event is being organized with The Brecht Forum, a short note:
The Brecht Forum is a place for people who are working for social justice, equality and a new culture that puts human needs first. Through its programs and events, the Brecht Forum brings people together across social and cultural boundaries and artistic and academic disciplines to promote critical analysis, creative thinking, collaborative projects and networking in an independent community-level environment.
Throughout the year, the Brecht Forum offers a wide-ranging program of classes, public lectures and seminars, art exhibitions, performances, popular education workshops, and language classes. These activities are developed in collaboration with the many social movements and the diverse communities of this most cosmopolitan of cities, and our programs bring together leading intellectuals, activists and artists from New York, across the U.S., and internationally.
The Brecht Forum was founded in 1975 as The New York Marxist School. In 1984, the founding collective incorporated as The Brecht Forum with The New York Marxist School as our core project. Additional projects include The Institute for Popular Education, founded in 1990 in collaboration with the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory & Arts at the Brecht which includes ongoing arts programming in collaboration with such projects as Neues Kabarett, an experimental jazz series initiated in 1998, Strike Anywhere Theater Ensemble, and Red Channels, a radical media collective.
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6. Common Notions
Common Notions has just published a book with Selma’s writings, some copies of which we hope to have available:
Common Notions is a book imprint that circulates both enduring and timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, and visionary meditations on the organization of both domination and its refusal. Inspired by various traditions of autonomism in the U.S. and internationally, it aims to provide tools of militant research in our collective reading of struggles past, present, and to come.
Common Notions publishes and distributes books nationally with PM Press, as well as micro-publishes a companion series called “Pocket Counterpower” in Brooklyn with machines and resources collectively shared or appropriated. Its programming arm organizes a series of discussions called ‘This is Forever’: From Inquiry to Refusal.
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7. Related Text
1. WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK LESS.
2. WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN, WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT.
3. It is in this context that WE DEMAND CONTROL OF OUR BODIES.
4. WE DEMAND EQUAL PAY FOR ALL.
5. WE DEMAND AN END TO PRICE RISES.
6. WE DEMAND FREE COMMUNITY CONTROLLED NURSERIES AND CHILD CARE.
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8. Useful Links
Common Notions Imprint [http://www.commonnotions.org]
This Is Forever Event Series [http://www.thisisforever.org]
PM Press [htttp://www.pmpress.org]
Brecht Forum [http://www.brechtforum.org]
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community [http://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james]