ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a short recapitulation of the historical basis of the Canadian political economy. This is essential to situate Canadian urban culture within the process of capital accumulation in a metropolitan-hinterland economy. The chapter presents an examination of the role of immigration. Immigration has played a very special role in the formation and deformation of urban class consciousness in Canada. It examines the process of the establishment of a routinized system of labour relations and the repression of radical labourism because it contends that this process of state intervention is crucial to understanding the process of integration. The chapter explores in considerable detail, as a kind of case study, the Winnipeg General Strike. It shows that urbanization as a mode of social control, as well as an engine of capital accumulation, has thus far successfully facilitated the synthesis of amnesia, integration and repression as a powerful bulwark against the development of class consciousness.
