Selma James and the Wages for Housework Campaign
So what does C.L.R. James and Every Cook Can Govern have to do with Selma James’s writings and the Wages for Housework campaign? C.L.R.’s philosophy of direct democracy subtly illuminates many of Selma James’ ideas. In highlighting the struggles facing housewives and working women, James says that these women can be self-governing now, not at some point in the distant future. She didn’t argue that housewives needed to be led to “progress” or liberation but instead were already situated in a position of power to gain liberation for themselves. She provides an abundance of examples of women’s instincts towards being self-governing and the ways in which women already attempt to subvert those forces that would relegate them to second class citizenship, be it inside the home to their husbands or outside the home to bosses, union bureaucracies, and official society.
In Women, The Unions and Work, C.L.R.’s influence can be seen when Selma James talks about the meaning of a miner’s strike in Great Britain: “What distinguished the miners is they didn’t depend on their unions but on their own self-organization and methods of struggle. More than once during the strike, the union tried to dictate the terms of struggle. For example, when the union asked workers to man safety crews, or tried to discourage them from violent defense of picket lines, or stood in the way of the women organizing independently. But the mining community went its own autonomous way.”[24]
Seen in light of its affinity with C.L.R.’s vision of direct democracy, Selma’s project takes on two characteristics. First, we see that the Wages for Housework campaign is not just a campaign for reform. It is a struggle to increase the autonomy of women from men and capital, “To the degree that we demand a wage and demonstrate our power, we will be able for the first time massively to get the support of men for what we demand.” A little later she mentions, “Men are more disciplined to work for wages because we are their dependents in their home working without wages.”[25]
James cites the struggle for women’s liberation on multiple planes: the struggle against patriarchy and capital. In the former sentence she is placing a women’s agenda which men must be supporters of. In the latter she is contextualizing the specific demand of wages for housework in the larger class struggle. She recognizes the one wage-earner household is problematic for working folks and envisions two bread-winners under one roof as more likely to win against capital.
The fruits of victory are clear for James, “To the degree we organize [sic] our power, we undermine the power relations which causes and then confirms the chauvinism of men against us.”[26] She goes on to say that when women demand a wage, they also are demanding control of their own bodies from capital and that they can refuse to be a surplus labor pool.
Second, she connects the common experience of women in the “village” and the “city” and breaks down the divide between a “modern” first world and a “backwards” third world strategy for women’s autonomy: “…we must make a parallel, different as they are, between underdevelopment in the Third World and the underdevelopment in the metropolis—to be more precise, in the kitchens of the metropolis.”[27] The commitment to solidarity is one of the principles that makes the Wages for Housework campaign unique and it is worth further exploration. It refuses a categorization of the experiences of women in small villages in Kenya, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc. as fundamentally different from the urban dwellers in cities like Nairobi, Kuala Lampur, Mexico City, New York, New Orleans, etc. It also refuses a sharp distinction between supposedly “liberated” first world women and supposedly “duped,” “victimized,” or “backwards” third world women. This constitutes a novel approach to what can be the basis for women’s solidarity.
City and village—often representative of differences in progress, modernity, and civilization—are often contrasted as two opposed ways of life with little in common. But this does not recognize crucial similarities between what would seem to be modern and what appear to be historically “backward” settings. This comparison of relative “progress” which is used in many progressive and radical movements, develops its own contradictions when trying to develop a more complete and anti-racist understanding of women’s oppression. It ends up suggesting that in order to be free, women of color living in so-called third world countries need to emulate the supposedly “liberated” lifestyles of their urban first world “sisters.” White middle class first world feminists who advocate this “tutoring” act like missionaries uplifting backwards natives and end up playing into the hands of racist patriarchs like George W. Bush who likes to claim he invaded Afghanistan to liberate the women there.
The Wages for Housework campaign argues that both urban and rural women are not as free as people imagine; it attempts to overcome the false distinction between an abstracted progressive and liberated metropolitan woman and a backward and oppressed tribal woman in the village. James sees this and is not afraid to point out the false notions of development offered by capitalism.
“Capitalist planning proposes to the Third World that it ‘develop’; that in addition to its present agonies, it too suffer the agony of an industrial counter-revolution. Women in the metropolis have been offered the same ‘aid’. But those of us who have gone out of our homes to work have warned the rest: inflation has riveted us to this bloody typing pool or to this assembly line, and in that there is no salvation.”[28]
She argues that neither capitalism nor feudal relations of work, at home, the field, the factory, or office are options of liberation for women, “But the struggle of the working woman is not to return to the isolation of the home, appealing as this sometimes may be on Monday morning; any more than the housewife’s struggle is to exchange being imprisoned in a house for being clinched to desks or machines…”[29]
When discussing the rural and urban divide, culture, religion, and ethnicity also come to define what is progressive and backward. Certain signposts have tended to mark progress and the possibility of women’s liberation while other signposts have said that women need to wait till their respective society reaches a stage of development. It is assumed that urban societies are the benchmark of modernity and progress where unions, management, and classes can work together for women’s liberation. Even progressives see modernity as a key marker which defines the possibilities of women’s liberation. James would argue otherwise. How have other feminists handled these questions? A brief look at them will reveal the importance of James’s attempt to break the rural and urban divide.
Juliet Mitchell’s comments on where women’s liberation might be possible: “Probably it is only in the highly developed societies of the West that an authentic liberation of women can be envisaged today.”[30] Mitchell is not alone. In the 1968 essay, “Sexual Politics,” Kate Millet goes on a tirade against international oppression of women, traversing regions of the world including the Middle East, “…the veil of Islam (or an attenuated existence as a human soul condemned to wear a cloth sack over her head all the days of her half-life).” She tags this “impressive catalogue of open tyrannies” with “the bound feet of all of old China’s women,” and “Studies of primitive societies.”[31]
Without breaking the urban and rural divide, women’s liberation will be trapped in the very paternalism it accuses unions and men of. James finds the common thread that brings women from countries considered to be modern and under-developed as a basis for political action.
James sketches what the organizational tasks of women are and what their possible demands might look like. What is it that she wants women to do? This question can be looked at from two points of view: organizationally and politically. James says, “The challenge to the women’s movement is to find modes of struggle, which while they liberate women from the home, at the same time avoid on the one hand a double slavery and on the other prevent another degree of capitalistic control and regimentation.”[32] James believes in the power of women to create new organizational forms that radically break from past conceptions of working class institutions. She recognizes in the current organizational development, “… the level of organisation [sic] of women is low.”[33]
Instead of relying on unions, James’s remedy is conceptualized in new organizations which break with tradition. She simply describes these organizations as, “Independent organisation [sic]—independent of every section of the establishment…”[34] This becomes difficult to conceptualize for the reader and James recognizes it “…is difficult to consider, let alone create, when thousands of women are not in motion.”[35] According to James, the origins of such an organization lie in the absenteeism of women at the workplace. She believes that the absenteeism of women signals a deeper problem in workplace relations of which women are rebelling on their own all the time. The next step is to bring the individual rebellions into organizational coherence.