Approaching working-class history as struggle: a Canadian contemplation; a Marxist meditation

This contribution to the Workers of the World forum makes the case for the need to historicize workers' experience, doing so in a particular kind of Marxist way. In this historicization, class must be conceived broadly, with the accent placed on the critical importance of processes of dispossession and the ways in which this historical divorcing of producers from relationships to the means of production inevitably leads to particular kinds of class conflicts. How these conflicts are conceived and written about, even when they seemingly do not lead to clear-cut clashes of adversarial class interests, can play a role in sustaining and widening class struggle. It is this class struggle which ultimately remains a decisive agent in social transformation.