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Selma James opened the “domestic labour debate” in the 1970s when she spelled out the obvious: the housework and caring work women do outside of the market produces the whole working class. Thus the market economy, based on those workers, is built on women’s unwaged work.

This was the first time the connection was drawn between capitalist exploitation of waged workers, and exploitation of unwaged workers not only women, but men and children, in the industrial world and especially in the non-industrial world. The working class was greater and the struggle against capitalism more comprehensive, than the left had ever envisaged. So the division of workers between waged and unwaged, between women and men, between industrial and non-industrial, between the “active labour army” and the “industrial reserve army”, is central to capitalist accumulation. And destroying these divisions is central to destroying capitalism.

Selma is founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and co-ordinator of the Global Women’s Strike. An activist since 1945, she wrote the classic A Woman’s Place in 1952 as part of CLR James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency. She has been described as a “truly creative thinker” who has done “path-breaking work”. She has been working with the Venezuelan Revolution since 2002.

Publications include: The Power of Women & the Subversion of the Community; Sex, Race & Class; Marx & Feminism; The Ladies & the Mammies: Jane Austen & Jean Rhys; Strangers & Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration; The Milk of Human Kindness: Defending Breastfeeding from the global market & the AIDS industry.