A GRATEFUL PREFACE

MARCUS REDIKER

Selma James is a treasure, as this volume of riches makes clear. For more than half a century she has played a significant role in a wide variety of radical organizations and movements, many of which are not nearly well enough known. From the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Facing Reality group of the 1950s, to the Race Today Collective in Brixton, to Global Women's Strike, James has animated and embodied a kind of radicalism that is increasingly relevant in today's world.

Her close association with the great Trinidadian scholar-activist CLR James provides a key to her political approach. One of the main ideas embodied in James's writings is what the late George Rawick, another close comrade of CLR James, called "working-class self-activity": those many and various and often invisible things the working class, broadly defined, does for itself in the quest for emancipation. The emphasis is on action, agency, new meanings and possibilities generated, often unpredictably, from social movement and conflict on the ground. CLR James always emphasized the importance of new forms of struggle that bubble up constantly from below, often alongside and sometimes against established left-wing institutions such as unions and political parties.

If the promise of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man (1791) was expanded by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and by the lesser-known but hugely important work of Thomas Spence, The Rights of Infants (1796), James has continued in this direction, asking how it came to be that "Women do two-thirds of the world's work, receive 5 percent of world income, and own less than 1 percent of world assets" — and asking, impatiently, how can this sordid reality be changed. She was doing pioneering theoretical and historical analysis of "race-class-gender," with an emphasis on how each constitutes the other, long before this became a popular analytical approach during the 1980s.

James's political theory and her organizing strategies thus come "from below" — that is to say, not from intellectuals or party functionaries who tell working people what they should be doing, but rather from factory workers, housewives, prostitutes, and migrants, as the following pages will show. And those people come not only from London and New York but from places that range from Mexico and Venezuela and Haiti to Kenya and Tanzania. James insists not only on deriving her ideas from interaction with working people of all kinds and all nations, she consistently tests and refines them in the same constituency. From her very first pamphlet, which she discussed with her fellow workers and neighbors, she has always trusted not only the decency of common people, but their ability to think and act. "Every cook can govern," wrote CLR James in 1956. James carried that optimistic message into the woman's world of work, the kitchen, and in so doing deepened and expanded its meaning.

The pamphlet James cowrote with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which is excerpted here, is, in my view, a classic of radical literature and one of the most important political documents of the 1970s, contributing as it did to both the working-class movement and the women's movement — indeed, showing activists in both that they shared a common struggle! The "Wages for Housework" campaign carried the message around the world. In this respect as in so many others, James's work has consistently expanded our idea of what the proletariat is, moving beyond the factory gate to the household, the streets, and the prison.

A case in point is her recent work with prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and one of the world's most eminent political prisoners. When James visited him at the SCI-Greene Supermax Prison in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, their wide-ranging political discussion turned to what prisoners do for themselves in their struggles against the law. The result was Jailhouse Lawyers, a fascinating study of working-class self-activity — how the prison functions as a kind of school and how prisoners educate themselves in order to help each other in their cases. James saw that vital, creative political work was being done in the belly of the beast, and she wanted everyone to know about it. She encouraged Mumia to write the book, which he did. When you read it, you will have a better understanding of race and class in America, and how a previously little-known movement from below is challenging the powers that be. You will also have a better understanding of what kind of political thinker James is.

Another thing I like about this collection of essays is their practicality: they show not only thought in relation to action, they convey a vivid sense of how a talented organizer actually works. In our rush to glorify theory, we too often forget the craft of practice, the democratic art of working with people amid all the contradictions of their lives. That is something James knows and does extremely well. These essays distill the precious wisdom of the organizer, much of it gained at the Crossroads Women's Centre in London.

In the end, I am delighted that PM Press has published this volume, because it will help James to become better known and to enable her to take her rightful place as one of the key political thinkers and activists of our times. She is, and has long been, a critical contributor to our knowledge commons, where a better future must lie. Indeed, she has been building it for almost six decades, as readers may now happily see for themselves.

A WINNING PERSPECTIVE

NINA LÓPEZ

Selma James has made and continues to make a critical contribution to the movement for social justice,...