The term "a usable past" is said to be first invented by a literary critic Van Wyck Brooks in his essay "On Creating a Usable Past," The Dial LXIV.7 (11 April 1918). This is an essay that Carl Remick would enjoy reading (if he hasn't read it already). Brooks thought that professors of literature of his days created the "American literary tradition" shaped by the twin filters of moralism and commercialism, together forming the dominant ideology of America then and now. To counter that official "tradition" which sterilized creative minds of the present, Brooks called for a usable past, a richer "tradition" invented by what Americans elect to remember, out of all the facts of the past, that is more likely to fertilize the present. Brooks was thinking in national terms, but the same can be said about remembering the past in class terms.
Aside from that, I was, as always, thinking of Walter Benjamin: "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably"; "Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren"; "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now"; "A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past"; "Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time"; etc.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>