Out of the Impasse
Debating Class Politics and Canadian Unions
This collection of Herman Rosenfeld’s writings provides a vital record of socialist analysis rooted in the lived experiences of Canadian labour. Drawing on his background as a shop floor worker at General Motors in Scarborough and in the education department of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW, now Unifor), this selection examines how a constantly changing capitalism seeks to reorganise workplace practices. And how, in resistance, working-class organisations must adapt, rebuild, and reimagine collective power. Across these essays, Rosenfeld argues that technological modernisations and economic “efficiencies” suggested by management are never value-neutral but rather political choices that reproduce class (and other) hierarchies unless challenged by workers and their representative organisations.
These interventions remind us that worker power depends not only on shop-floor solidarity but on building a capacity for independent collective political action by unions and workers, and a political project capable of addressing the impasse in trade union organizing and struggle in Canada as well as confronting capitalism itself.
Socialist Interventions Pamphlet No. 26 – July 2026.
