Commentary During a recent class I took in pursuit of an MA in history, the discussion organically turned to the current academic obsessions of race, gender, and class. No longer as brash as I was at the age of most of my classmates, I’m safe and happy keeping my mouth shut on the first two. Having grown up emphatically working class, though, I’m willing to venture into that territory the way the Canadian-born walk on ice in winter: prudently yet getting where they want to go. Why, I asked, do we still use the classification “working class” when a major swathe of its former cohort has been unwillingly replaced by robots, and the surviving few bide time until “progress” turns them into IT technicians who fix the robots? Why, in other words, do we keep fishing out of the dustbin of history a Marxist category that was already losing steam …