I couldn’t resist it last night – even though there were many other things that I should have been doing – an event “to mark International Workers’ Day and the 35th anniversary of the Wages for Housework Campaign”, being held by the Kentish Town Women’s Centre. The speaker was Selma James, one of the intellectual forces of the early women’s movement, and it was a fascinating if somewhat frustrating evening.
The subject of the talk was “What the Marxists never told us about Marx”, and it was primarily a theoretical talk, covering some basic labor theory of value stuff, then some divergence from the “orthodox” line, if there is such a thing, to claim that Marx did appreciate the value of women’s unpaid labour in the home.
James is an obvious intellectual powerhouse and a patrician, if I can be allowed such a term, of the Left, a fine speaker. And as an “introduction to one aspect of Marxism” lecture this could hardly be faulted. And in the “question time” she came up with some great soundbites: “Capitalism has a smell you know. Its agents have a smell, a political smell.” We are all, she suggested “drenched in the ideology and reality of the market”.
Yet I was disappointed there wasn’t more about “wages for housework” (almost it seems what is happening by default with the return of the cleaner, the nanny, the au pair etc).
And I was left feeling without a shadow of a doubt that this was not where I belonged, politically or by era. Perhaps I’m too much of a postmodernist – or perhaps just a sceptic – but to claim that the writings of one person has all of the answers, as James does (let alone a man with a beard who lived 150 years ago) seems to me a ridiculous exercise in hero worship, or else an act of ventriloquism – when someone wrote as many words as Marx, you can find hints of pretty well anything in them. (The old Leninist from whom I learnt my basic Marx nearly had apoplexy when I said that to him, but I retain the view – I like “Marx the anarchist”, but there are lots of different Marxes.)
And talking about “The Revolution”, however much that was qualified as something with many different forms definitely brings out the postmodernist in me.
But it was a great banner…
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