Surviving Society Podcast
August 2021
Selma James, Sara Callaway, Shanice Octavia McBean & Aviah Day met the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London to discuss Selma’s latest book, Our Time is Now: Sex, Race, Class and Caring for People and Planet crossroadsbooksonline.net
Guest Hosts:
Selma James is an antisexist, antiracist, anti-capitalist campaigner. In 1972 she put forward Wages for Housework (WFH) as a demand and a political perspective that redefined the working class to include all who work without wages, starting with women, the primary carers everywhere. The International WFH Campaign she founded co-ordinates the Global Women’s Strike. She co-authored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. With her husband and colleague CLR James, she worked in the movement for independence and federation of the English-speaking Caribbean. Her much-anticipated Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet (2021), together with her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class (2012), focus on what can be learnt from decades of building an international network. Selma James was recently honoured with the Sheila McKechnie Long-term Achievement Award. She is based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London.
Sara Callaway, Women of Colour Global Women Strike, is an immigrant, active in women’s, anti-racist, environmental justice, anti-war and anti-deportation movements for 40 years. Women of Colour GWS (WoC) organises to end sexism, racism, poverty, and every discrimination, police violence and militarism. We are part of the global Black Lives Matter movement, focusing especially on Haiti and Palestine. We demand a care income for everyone, of all genders, who do caring work, including justice work, for people and the natural world; the funds to come from military budgets and corporations. WoC is part of Global Women Against Deportations (GWAD), a coalition of groups organising for immigrant rights.
Aviah Sarah Day is at Birkbeck, University of London teaching and researching as her job, and is community organiser the rest of the time. She is involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services as well as state violence. She is also involved in London Renters Union and the Kill the Bill Coalition, a national movement resisting the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill.
Shanice Octavia McBean is a Black feminist activist and writer currently working in the Kill the Bill Coalition. She describes herself as an Afro-Marxist and is currently working on a book on criminalisation, abolition and Empire.
