Class of Struggle was made in direct and radical response to Marker and co-director Mario Marret's portrait of a textile factory strike and occupation, À Bientôt, j’espère. When Marker learned that the factory workers were dissatisfied with his film's depiction of the strike, he set out to give the camera, encouragement and filmmaking instructions to workers themselves. Establishing a new collective of SLON members and newly empowered factory worker-filmmakers, Marker and the group turned now to another strike unfolding in a French watch factory. One of the most radical political films of the period, Class of Struggle is remarkable for its interweaving of the distinct voices and perspectives of the labor strife and for the emergence, nevertheless, of a kind of leader in the charismatic figure of an extraordinary young woman who gives the collective a brave voice and example.

The Cinétracts were a series of short 16mm films shot in Paris during the upheaval of May 1968 by Chis Maker and a host of the most talented and politically engaged French filmmakers of the period – including Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Phillipe Garrel and Jackie Raynal. With the instructions that their films should be silent, unsigned, edited entirely in camera (rules clearly broken by Godard) and widely distributed the Ciné-tract group set out to capture the unrest.

Marker's charged rendering of the October 21, 1967 march on the Pentagon was made for a French “television magazine” and later distributed by the Franco-Belgian film collective, SLON). Integrating still photographs, voiceover commentary and dramatic actuality footage, Marker's hard-hitting short represents a forcible mode of alternative reportage, a type of counter-newsreel made during a period of intense distrust of the mainstream media.