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History without philosophy
History
without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths
of our time. Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian
myth--the ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its
associated rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive,
ideology, and interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a
priori, of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency,
intentionality, habitus, action networks and networks of power, and
context.
from John S. Kloppenborg, Christ's Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (Yale, 2019)
Understandings of personhood . . . are culturally constructed and vary
from one culture to another. For most of the world's cultures
personhood is constructed in a collectivist context rather than one
that imagines society as an aggregate of individuals. As Clifford
Geertz famously observed, "The Western conception of the person as a
bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and
cognitive universe; a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement,
and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively
both against other such wholes and against a social and natural
background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather
peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures." p. 12-13
Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018).
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transcendental empiricism
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from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462):
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.
In place of "society," the culture complex . . .
from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke
University, 2007)
. . . the primary ontological unit is not independent objects
with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather
what Bohr terms 'phenomena.' . . . phenomena do not merely mark
the epistemological inseperability of observer and observed, or the
results of measurement; rather, phenomena are the ontological
inseperability of agentially intra-acting components. . . .
phenomena are not mere laboratory creations but basic units of
reality. The shift from a metaphysics of things to phenomena
makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and
ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues more generally.
33
. . . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but
phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements /
relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary
semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices
through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted.
This dynamic is agency.
from John Dupré, The Metaphysics of Biology (Cambridge, 2021)
The reductionists
world is an ordered world. Everything happens for a reason, or at
least a sufficient cause, and explanations of events are good in
proportion to how much of this underlying cause they capture. But
the ordered world is at best an object of faith. The world might
equally well be highly disordered, with the little bits of order that
we encounter, most notably living systems, rare and precious
exceptions. . . . One way of articulating an account of
such a world is as consisting of temporarily ordered structures, what
we often describe as "things", in a flux of largely disordered
processes. p. 15
from Everything from Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré eds. (Oxford, 2018)
What
organisms do is quite unlike what other natural entities do.
Organisms constitute a distinct ontological category. They are a
special kind of processual thing; they are agents. . . .
Methodological vitalism is the view that evolution should be studied
from the perspective of the distinctive role that agents play in
enacting evolution.
from Levi R. Bryant,
Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the
Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
. . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural affinity
with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural common
sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought cannot
help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit
presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially
contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a crique of the
transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant
categories. (17)
A style or essence is what we might refer to as an identity of
difference, or an identity produced through difference. It is not
a type or a kind, but rather a rule of production, a genetic
factor. It is an identity that maintains itself through
topological variations. It is for this reason that we speak of
morphological essences or diagrams of becoming. 68
Although Deleuze himelf never makes reference to the notion of
topological essences, the theme can be seen to run throughout his work.
. . . Insofar as a topological identity is produced between the
variations a structure can undergo, Deleuze is also able to maintain
the being of concrete universals which are no longer opposed to
particulars. 70-71
from Inka Mülder-Bach, "Introduction" to Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty amd Distraction in Weimar Germany (Verso, 1998), p. 15.
.
. . now theory forfeits its hierarchically privileged position in
relation to empirical material. It infiltrates the surface, so to
speak, manifesting itself in the way the tessera of the 'mosaic' are
cut and in the interstices left between them. . . . this
conceptual language misses precisely what matters crucially to
Kracauer: the details of the situations, their complexity, the
perspectives of their agents . . . His investigation, therefore,
refrains from formulating its insight in a conceptual language removed
from its material. . . Knowledge of the material's significance
becomes the principle of its textual representation, so that the
representation itself articulates the theory.
from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018), p. 179
The
seriousness of the current reality means that at the present rate, the
majority of eighth-grade children could be classified as functionally
illiterate in a few years' time.
Nietzsche, Will to Power, preface:
What I
relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what
is coming, what can no longer come differerently: the advent of
nihilism.
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primate-style dominance is
periodically overthrown and then restored
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from
Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective:
human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing
cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61
Mimetic
representations are evident in human children before they acquire
language competence. . . . They continue to be important in
adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic
skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of
aggression or rejection).
from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4
. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted
through violence or threat is the internal principle of social
organization. . . . Among humans . . . primate-style dominance is
periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and
restored again and again.
Franz de Waal, Our Inner Ape (Riverhead, 2005) (p. 135)
Tendencies
toward group identification, xenophobia, and lethal combat--all of
which do occur in nature--have combined with our highly developed
planning capacities to "elevate" human violence to its inhuman
level. The study of animal behavior may not be much help when it
comes to things like genocide, but if we move away from nation-states,
looking instead at human behavior in small-scale societies, the
differences are not that great anymore.
from Fyodor Dostoevski, Notes from Underground, p. 96-7
Now
let’s see how things are with people who are capable of revenge and, in
general, of taking care of themselves. When the desire for
revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a time of every
other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . . Now let’s look
at this mouse in action. Let’s assume it has been humiliated (it
is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge
itself. It’s possible too that there’s even more spite
accumulated in it than in l’homme de la nature et de la verite.
The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to repay the offender in kind
may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse than in the natural man who,
because of his innate stupidity, considers revenge as merely justice .
. . . In its repulsive, evil-smelling nest, the downtrodden,
ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and—most
important—never-ending hatred. For forty years, it will remember
the humiliation in all its ignominious details . . .
from Marshall Sahlins, Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of human nature. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at The University of Michigan, November 4, 2005
Human
culture, it needs be considered, is much older than human nature:
culture has been in existence for two million years or more, ten or
fifteen times longer than the modern human species, homo sapiens.
Respectable biological opinion has come around to seeing the human
brain as a social organ, evolving in the Pleistocene under the
“pressure” of maintaining a relatively extended, complex, and solidary
set of social relationships. This is to say that culture, which is
the condition of the possibility of this successful social
organization, thereby conditioned the possibilities of the human
organism, body and soul. The “pressure” was to become a cultural
animal, or, more precisely, to culturalize our animality. For two
million years, we have evolved biologically under cultural
selection. Not that we are or were “blank slates,” lacking any
inherent biological imperatives, only that what was uniquely selected
for in the genus homo was the ability to realize these imperatives in
the untold different ways that archaeology, history, and anthropology
have demonstrated. Biology became a determined determinant,
inasmuch as its necessities were mediated and organized symbolically.
What is most
pertinent to the relations between physis and nomos is not (for
example) that all cultures have sex but that all sex has culture.
sexual drives are variously expressed and repressed according to local
determinations of appropriate partners, occasions, times, places, and
bodily practices. We sublimate our generic sexuality in all kinds of
ways—including its transcendence in favor of the higher values of
celibacy, which also proves that in symbolic regimes there are more
compelling ways of achieving immortality than the inscrutable mystique
of the “selfish gene.”
As it is for sex,
so for other inherent needs, drives, or dispositions: nutritional,
aggressive, egoistic, sociable, compassionate—whatever they are, they
come under symbolic definition and thus cultural order. In the
occurrence, aggression or domination may take the behavioral form of,
say, the new Yorker’s response to “Have a nice day”—“don’t tell me what
to do!” We war on the playing fields of Eton, give battle
with swear words and insults, dominate with gifts that cannot be
reciprocated, or write scathing book reviews of academic adversaries.
Eskimos say gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs. But to think that,
or to think our proverbial opposite, that gifts make friends—a saying
that like the Eskimos’ goes against the grain of the prevailing
economy—requires that we are born with “watery souls,” waiting to
manifest our humanity for better or worse in the meaningful experiences
of a particular way of life.
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the stuff of fascism
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from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:
Let us add at once that . .
. the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard
of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the
aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine
spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and
the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . .
. gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as
if with him something were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man
were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28
. . . ressentiment is
trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What
“empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused,
but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been
treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in
his place.
from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 6
To
see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. . .
. Without cruelty there is no festival. . . . and in
punishment there is so much that is festive!
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the stuff of fascism manifested (talkin' shit)
the stuff of fascism manifested (talkin' shit): see Semiotic Regimes.
( the primary
semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices)
“You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”
I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. (emphasis added)
from
Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018)
The narcissism in question is not only Trump’s. More important is that
of his followers, who idealise him as they once, in childhood,
idealised themselves. Beyond that, the demagogue has a special appeal
to wounded narcissism, to the feeling that one has failed to meet
standards one has set for oneself.
In Adorno’s
words, ‘the superman has to resemble the follower and appear as his
“enlargement”.’ The leader ‘completes’ the follower’s self-image. This
helps explain the phenomenon of the ‘great little man’, the ‘Aw
shucks’, ‘just folks’ demagogue like Huey Long. He ‘seems to be the
enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection
of himself, rather than an image of the father’ – a Trump, in other
words, rather than a Washington or Roosevelt.
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cognitive-discursive performativity:
What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current
thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its
metaphysical presuppositions.
Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal, "Trump," and the historical path connecting them. This is because "Trump" forces us to face the question of our primate heritage and its corrolary,
patrimonialism),
on the one hand, and the fragility of print-based civilization, on
the other.
Evidence
abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and
cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay
of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, and their contemporary
disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this
site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
Trump's
Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us
with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this
accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive performativity. We have a detailed description of this meeting in A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."* A close reading of that chapter can be found here. The chapter in its entirety can be found here. The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius,
are the
primitive
cognitive performativity of president Trump, his brutish behavior
toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were
flabergasted by this brutish stupidity. "He's a fucking moron",
said Rex Tillerson. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)
Now read these articles, especially the Comments attached to "American Children's Reading Skills Reach New Lows." see Children's reading Skills, comments. This selection of comments is a phenomenological bundle.
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (NYT October 26, 2018)
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books the Atlantic, October 1, 2024.
"American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows" NYT jan 29, 2025
‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence? the Guardian, April 19, 2025
"Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime"
NYT April 10, 2025
A.I. Killed the Math Brain NYT. June 2, 2025
Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs (NYT 6-23-25)
Michael O’Connell, "David Foster Wallace, A.I. and the future of the humanities" (America: the Jesuit Review, 6-27-25)
Taking into account the major perspectives on the
development of language and cognition, and applying these results and
methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativities of "school", "politics", and the "media," we
are led to a chilling conclusion: we are now living through the disintegration of
the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity.
What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current
thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its
metaphysical presuppositions. Figure 0. From the Origins of
Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, provides a
framework for conceptualizing what is currently inconceivable. Short of something similar in scope and depth to the Reformation, our fate is sealed. We are living through " . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "1
from A.I. Killed the Math Brain NYT. June 2, 2025
"The worry is that we, as a society, will become innumerate, not just
illiterate. A.I. appears to be exacerbating an alarming trend in which
our basic education is failing our young citizens. And that crisis is
aimed at the most basic elements of that education: reading, writing
and arithmetic."2
1. Earl Miller, quoted in Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think
Deeply Again (Crown, 2022), p. 42. |
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Children's Reading Skills: Comments
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GailG, Rockville, MD
I’m a school
librarian at a suburban school. Most of our kids are middle class
but we do have students from low income families as well. Not
only do most kids eschew reading by fifth grade (the Kindergartners are
still eager!) but when they do read they are mostly reading graphic
novels, which are comics. We limit them to two of these at a time
but they still choose not to check out novels. In class most of
them cannot restate in their own words the content of a short
paragraph. Before vacation when I query them about what they are
excited about the vast majority say, “play lots of video games “.
From the trenches, there is no question in my mind that screen time has
had a huge negative impact on their reading comprehension. Trying
to convince them to read is an uphill battle when parents are not
limiting screen time. Usually educators get blamed for low
reading scores but parents are the ones who need to spend time at home
making sure their kids are putting into practice the skills that are
being taught at school.
Jeanie Macdonald
As a high school teacher, its clear that years of being stuck like glue
to their phones has degraded children's ability to focus on any reading
longer than a sentence. When I give them six pages to read for
homework, they act like their world is falling apart! It's nonsense.
They simply have to be made to read more, and read longer books. Books!
Annika. MA
There are so many contributing factors from screen time to videos to
parents to school funding to political interference from school boards
and PTAs to social conditions in the community to the child's interest
themselves. It is pointless to try to find one sole cause or thing to
blame when you have to look at the child's educational progress
holistically and within context of the experiences of the broader
school community. But, I think that attention span is increasingly
becoming an issue that needs to be addressed. About 15 years ago, an
acquaintance was teaching college level filmography part-time. He
stopped teaching though because he was frustrated that the
student would neither watch or create films that were longer than 3-5
minutes. And these were college age Millennials. More recently the NY
Times reported how college professors are receiving students who do not
know how to read a full book from start to finish in high school. That
they had only been given excerpts from books to study passages. I don't
know how to address improving attention, maybe aides in the classroom
to help focus students and increase their time on task.
Leneen
I was a high school librarian in a top ranked public school. There was
NO reading culture. If you read you were considered strange. Students
couldn’t understand complex texts. At all. There were no efforts made
by administration to develop and support readers. Even English teachers
had given up. A very sad state of affairs.
Linda K
A former co-worker pursued her ME to teach history at Southern CT SU.
Stated plainly, her writing and reading skills were marginal at best. I
surreptitiously edited and/or re-wrote every document she created for
over two years. How can a barely literate person graduate with a
master’s and then successfully teach children to be well spoken, well
read and well written? Something is wrong with our broken education
system and it’s not a new phenomenon in this post-covid period. It’s
multi-generational and several decades in the making.
alpenglow
As a second grade teacher, I am not surprised by these results. In the
23 years that I have taught, I have watched student misbehavior
increase dramatically, and attention spans have similarly decreased.
Students used to be excited to learn, but now the vast majority
just.... aren't. I don't know why, and I don't know how to fix it, but
I do know that my job has gotten dramatically worse and unrewarding to
the point that I am likely going to leave the profession at the end of
this school year.
Mr Mallard
Initially kids need phonics. However, I think the widespread notion
that schools "stopped teaching phonics" for decades is overblown.
The main problem isn't phonics, it's volume. Kids just don't read enough.
If you want kids to read, they have to actually read. Not just do
phonics drills. Not just word work. They have to read, a lot, for hours
every day, for years and years.
907guy
ITSS - It's
the screens stupid. Kids are being re-programmed to only read short
blurbs on their phones. texts, chats, short videos on Tik-Tok, kids
have lost their attention span and ability to focus.
I'm a teacher and
if I assign reading kids freak out. I send out emails and they say they
didn't read them because they were too long (less than one page). I was
observed by a supervisor and I had my class read out loud and assigned
reading for an upcoming quiz. I was later told that kids 14 yo don't
read, so don't bother assigning it. I said the opposite, that kids
don't read because it isn't assigned and enforced. It's an uphill
battle when school administrators appear to have given in to the short
attention span syndrome that kids have adopted.
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Situating the Keynesian elite: (Maza, in relation to; in relation to other elites;
Fig. 1a, The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt
administration circa 1936. This particular social formation
(TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical
role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when
FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as
Figure 1a indicates, the socio-technical infrastructure of the New Deal
state. The work that produced this result can be found here:
"The Origins of the "Welfare State": The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, 1910-1936" (manuscript, 1987)
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the biocultural niche of modernity
Figure 1a. Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State
Source: "Membership List, May 1927" in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library,
and The United States Government Manual 1937. Also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix
Nobuo Noda, How Japan Absorbed American Management Methods (Asian Productivity Organization, 1969)
Ordway Tead, "An Interpretative Forecast of the NRA: Is the Trend Toward Fascist or
Socialized Self-Government?" Bulletin of the Taylor Society, August 1933
For context see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
FDR vs. the Slave Power: MEMO July 10, 1935
"Liberal Businessmen" Ezekiel
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the biocultural niche of modernity
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the New Deal: action networks and networks of power (a critique of marxism)
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed. These
bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural niche of modernity. In
this regard they had more in common with the New Deal vanguard of
Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their fellow workers in
the plants. For this reason it was
possible to co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the
interviews that, in another context, could be referred to as the
extended mind of the Unity caucus.
All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen
seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind,
but also by what can only be described as their strength of
character. They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.
When placed in the contexts of Figure 0 and the periodization of A History of Reading and Writing
provided by Lyons, the extended mind of the Unity caucus becomes a
cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made
regarding the historicity of language and cognition.
I had no idea at the time (the
mid-1970s) that these interviews would prove to be critical to a
reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of cognitive-discursive
performativity that includes the concepts of biocultural niche and bildung.
Nor could I have possible imagined that the cognitive-discursive
performativities upon which this site depends represented the high
point of the development of the biocultural niche of modernity ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.").
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Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
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John L. Brooke, "There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation
in the Coming of the Civil War (U. Mass. Press, 2019)
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the New Deal: action networks and networks of power (a critique of marxism)
Fig. 1a.1, U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948: capital formations and the two-party system, is the indespensible point of departure for any study of politics. Its key concept is sector of realization
I
look at the actual activities, the flows of money, material, and labor; and, in the case of the KE, l
. The input-output matrices of
actual firms demonstrated that there were key sectors of accumulation,
networks of power, and that the chief executive officers of firms
intersected with the polity in such a way that the "state" under FDR
could be better characterized as a segmented state within which the
Keynesian elite (rooted in mass consumption) finally achieved parity
with the two older elite formations--commodities in international trade
(cotton, tobacco, wheat, copper together with their financial, legal,
and commercial and transportation service providers), and the securities bloc, rooted in
infrastructure capital--iron, coal, railroads, telephones and the
financial institutions connected with marketing and trading their
securities, and the legal firms that serviced them.
The
Securities bloc supplied the major appointees of GOP
administrations, organized the National Civic Federation, and supported
the First New Deal of the National Recovery Administration.
(Later it became know as the GOP's eastern establishment.) see
Bush interlocking networks; Eisenhower Republicans (Eastern
establishment); the Reagan miracle: you could havve your cake and eat
it too.
Commodities in international trade dominated the old Democratic
Party (Copperheads . . . north).
The mass consumption sector was the second New Deal.
To speak only of big business vs. small; of center vs. periphery; of
moderates vs. conservatives, is to begin with abstract categories
unrelated to actual practices.
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Fig. 1a.1. U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948
input-output matrices: sectors of realization and the two-party system
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
KE2019
The New Deal and Capitalism (notes)
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
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Midland Steel Corporation,
Detroit Division
I conducted about 40 interviews of union members, activists and
officers, the nurse, the works manager, and the Vice President of the
Frame Division.
I also examined the papers of Newton Baker and Felix Frankfurter.
Newton Baker was on the Board of Directors of the Cleveland Turst
Corporation. Felix Frankfurter was the hed of the Cleveland
Foundation. The list of firms linked to the bank is incomplete.
The White Motor Company was an important scene in the development of
the UAW. Wyndham Mortimer, one of the if not the most important
organizer of the early UAW, worked for White Motor.
John Carmody, head of the Society of Industrial Engineers and active in
the Taylor Society, was active in Cleveland in the years following
WWI.
The Almangamated Clothing Workers were engaged in labor-management coooperation in Cleveland.
In this context it is interesting to compare Mortimer's insider account
of White Motor's progressive approach to labor relations with Henry
Kraus's outsider and ideologically driven characterization of of the
company's approach to unionization.
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Midland Steel, UAW Local 410
1. The AFL Faction: the Non-Production Craft and Service Sector
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
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| Oran Snyder
| German
| Catholic
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| repair weld
| assembly
| Glen Snyder
| German
| Catholic
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| repair weld
| assembly
| Anton Boll
| German/Kashub?
| Catholic
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| die maker
| tool room
| Frrank Carr
| Irish
| Catholic
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| crib clerk
| tool room
| Joseph Bergeron
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
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| tool welder
| tool room
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| F. Bieske
| German
| Catholic
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| plumber
| maintenance
| Fred Kraus
| German
| Catholic
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| pipefitter
| maintenance | F. Mathews
| Irish
| Catholic
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| millwright
| maintenance
| A. Dumais
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
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| electrician
| maintenace
| Carl Brendel
| German
| Catholic
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| plumber
| maintenace |
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| J. Killala
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1899
| crane operator
| transportation
| William Babcock
| German
| Catholic
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| crane operator | transportation | Junius Pruitt
| Black
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| tractor driver
| transportation |
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| Pete Olshove
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1898
| hyd. press die set
| press room
| Agnes Baaranski
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1900
| press operator
| press room
| Marie Budna
| Czech
| Catholic
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| press operator
| press room
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| H. L. Harris
| Black
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| 1891
| Hannifin op.
| assembly
| A. M. Smith
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1910
| arc welder
| assembly
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u
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2. The CIO Milieu: Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
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| North European
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| Thomas Dyer
| Ky. Mason
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| die maker
| tool room
| Sam Brear
| Scot//Czech |
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| machine hand
| tool room
| A. Barton
| Indiana WASP
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| diie maker
| tool room
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| Ben Wainwright
| Pa. English
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| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud English
| WASP RR Okla
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| 1906
| arc welder
| assembly
| Norm Green
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
| 1912
| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud Berkey
| Pa. WASP
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| 1904
| arc welder
| assembly
| John Fisher
| Scotch
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| 1897
| spot welder
| assembly
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| G. Watson
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| press operator
| press room
| Mac Mackelvey
| Scot
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| press operator
| press room
| A. Fritche
| German
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| 1899
| large press op.
| press room
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| THE LEFT
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| Bill Sumak
| Russian
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| 1897
| press operator
| press room
| George Borovich
| Serb
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| 1913
| press operator
| press room
| Fred Cini
| Maltese
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| 1905
| press operator
| press room
| James Dinkle
| Germ/Kashub
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| 1910
| press operator
| press room
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| John Kazmierski
| Polish
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| 1912 | Proj. welder | assembly
| Peter Borovich
| Serbian
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| 1914 | arc welder
| assembly
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| Peter Kotenko
| Russian
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| 1915
| labor
| transportation
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| THE SECOND GENERATION
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| John Kazmierski
| Polish
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| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ed Grabowski
| Polish
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| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ted Maciag
| Polish
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| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Frank Kusz
| Polish
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| 1896
| arc welder | assembly | Chester Podorski
| Polish
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| 1917
| Hannifin op
| assembly
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| Oscar Oden
| Black
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| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Warfield
| Black
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| 1896
| assembler
| assembly
| Nelson Merrill
| Black
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| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Patterson
| Black
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| 1902
| assembler
| assembly
| Edgar Hicks
| Black
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| 1891
| hannifin op
| assembly
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The
Securities bloc was the subject of the Pujo investigation and of Louis
D. Brandeis' book Other Peoples Money. One should click now on
the link below and become familiar with what, in the public rhetoric of
that time, was called Big Business. That of course, as will be
seen, is a perfectly useless term, inasmuch as it is external to the
praxis of the network of power, the input-output matrix delineated by
the Pujo investigation.
Money Trust Investigation : Investigation
of Financial and Monetary Conditions in the United States Under House
Resolutions Nos. 429 and 504 Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on
Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, (1912-1913)
Louis D. Brandeis, Other People's Money
One network of power subsumable under the concept of Commodities in
International Trade is delineated in Elliot Rosen's Hoover,
Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: from Depression to New Deal (Columbia
University Press, 1977)
Figure 1a. Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind: the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State, must be the point of departure for understanding the second New
Deal. Notice that it is possible to group the administrative
agencies of the second New Deal state into five major groups:
infrastructure, human capital, labor, planning, and credit. Each
group was staffed by a set of Taylor Society "technocrats" and a
Frankfurter-linked lawyer. See Bruce Allen Murphy, The
Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two
Supreme Court Justices (Oxford, 1982).
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The Taylor Society, Mass Distribution Sector, 1927
Source: "Membership List, May 1927" in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library
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the second element of a critique of marxism: its failure to address the role of real elite formations in American politics
This is the second element of a critique of marxism:
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the biocultural niche of modernity
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the New Deal: action networks and networks of power (a critique of marxism)
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed. These
bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural niche of modernity. In
this regard they had more in common with the New Deal vanguard of
Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their fellow workers in
the plants. For this reason it was
possible to co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the
interviews that, in another context, could be referred to as the
extended mind of the Unity caucus.
All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen
seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind,
but also by what can only be described as their strength of
character. They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.
When placed in the contexts of Figure 0 and the periodization of A History of Reading and Writing
provided by Lyons, the extended mind of the Unity caucus becomes a
cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made
regarding the historicity of language and cognition.
I had no idea at the time (the
mid-1970s) that these interviews would prove to be critical to a
reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of cognitive-discursive
performativity that includes the concepts of biocultural niche and bildung.
Nor could I have possible imagined that the cognitive-discursive
performativities upon which this site depends represented the high
point of the development of the biocultural niche of modernity ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.").
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Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
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John L. Brooke, "There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation
in the Coming of the Civil War (U. Mass. Press, 2019)
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A close look at
the January 6 arrestees (a critique of marxism)
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the respectable
media, which claimed that "the
angry crowd at the Capitol . . . seemed to come
not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence
Main Street backgrounds,"1 what is found instead is a population in the process of
marginalization. The instability in their lives was manifested in
the difficulty of category formation. The standard occupational
and industry classifications2 are inadequate, indeed
misleading. Gyms, bars, tatoo parlors, restaurants, salons, and
gun shops occur regularly in the entire dataset. To view the
individual owners of these establishments solely in terms of their role
as "shop owners" is misleading. What we are really dealing with
is social networks, not Cartesian selves. Very few if any of the
arrestees were connected to mainstream occupations and industries: none
in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern
corporate sector. They could be better characterized as grifters. This is a challenge to the neat concept of class.
from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 40
Their talk,
however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless
without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without
courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious
intention in the whole batch of them . . .
from Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (FSG, 2011), p. 128
It was true that
Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it
wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or
electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s childhood, were
usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north side. (“Oh, Al,”
Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,” and she couldn’t
understand why they had tospend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.)
1. from the New York Times (January 26, 2021): "One
striking aspect of the angry crowd at the Capitol was how many of its
members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but
from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real
estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member."
2. North American Industry Classification System (U.S. Census Bureau)
Standard Occupational Classification System (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
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Approaching Fascism Immanently: Four Phenomenological Bundles
(a critique of marxism)
1. the mob at the capitol
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity)
The language of these arrestees can be seen here:
The theoretical resources re. cognitive-discursive performativity:
These resources deployed:
3. The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
4. state of the art scholarship
Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).
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The hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves derived
from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of demonic
lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for the most part, a
standard structure and a similar set of primary themes.
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where does grifter
fit into an class-analytic framework; the grifter's historical role
(Trump): parasitical; the degradation of the biocultural niche of
modernity (Moses et. al.)
the return of the repressed (patrimonialism)
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from Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (MIT Press, 2013), pp. 2-3
Simondon's approach entails a substitution of ontogenesis for
traditional ontology, grasping the genesis of individuals within the
operation of individuation as it is unfolding.
ontogenesis occurs in one of more biocultural fields.
3) Joseph Conrad on the GOP
"Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was
reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without
courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious
intention in the whole batch of them . . . "
* Joseph Conrad on the GOP, from Heart of Darkness, p. 40
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bildung (a critique of marxism)
Bildung: the developmental-historical dialectic of self and world.
(Einstein's Generation, Maza)
Ken Richardson, Understanding Intelligence (Cambridge, 2022)
from Kristin Gjesdal, "Bildung," in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2015)
Bildung and culture are two sides of the same coin, or, to put it
otherwise, Bildung is culture in the active, progressive sense of
cultivation. (698)
The discourse on Bildung reflects a new understanding of the human
being. The individual is not determined by inherited identity and
privileges, but viewed in the light of his or her on-going capacity for
self-formation, as this does itself borrow from and contribute to the
community of which he or she is a part. (702)
from Marina F. Bykova, "Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung," in The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (palgrave macmillan, 2020)
Hegel portrays Bildung as an on-going dialectical
(contradiction-ridden) process, a series of achievements that
contribute to the individual’s self-making. Yet this process of
self-formation is not a purely individual undertaking; it is a social
enterprise that takes place in the historical and social world (the
world of spirit) through various interactions with other individuals. .
. . It is this complex process of the formation of the universal
subjects of thought, will, and action historically and socially
developed within the cultural forms of the manifest (world) spirit that
Hegel describes as “path of Bildung.” (426)
The modern, Enlightenment-based idea of education defines its main aim
as providing support for individual development toward maturity.
From this perspective, education is a finite process.
Furthermore, education focuses on the individual, considering his
growth toward maturity as primarily an individual cognitive process,
without taking into account this individual’s social interactions and
practical engagement with the historical-cultural world. Yet
Bildung for Hegel is the formative self-development of spirit (in both
its “forms—as individual human and and world spirit) regarded as a social
and historical process. Cognitive advancement is only one of the
dimensions of Bildung, but this, too, is treated as a historical-social
phenomenon. (430)
. . . Bildung is employed in the Phenomenology not merely to
delineate the process of the individual’s development from the natural,
“uneducated” standpoint to the “educated” position of modern science,
but also to conceptualize the on-gong process of world history.
However, the focus here is still on one single historical epoch, the
epoch of emerging modernity, which is described as the world of
Bildung. (432)
Bildung functions in Hegel's system not only as the driving force
forming self-conscious individual subjects but also as the engine of
the historical development of human societies and of the
historical-cultural world itself. (442)
A specific meaning of Bildung, which marks an important legacy of
Hegel’s conceptualizstion of this notion, is the meaning of Bildung as
world-encountering understood as a necessary condition of human
self-development. The core dimension of Bildung is neither the
world as such nor the individual itself, but the specific interplay
between the self and the world. (444)
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Thinking about Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
Genetic Ontology
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Sources
(Full page here)
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Primate
Dominance and Deference
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SOOL, Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
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Paleolithic
Dynamic Egalitarianism
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SOOL, Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
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Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense
Despotic regime; Racism;
Nationalism; Fascism
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Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
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Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance)
Progressive Narcisism; Individuation;
Progressivism, Socialism, Communism
the UAW and the Keynesian Elite
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Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Alcorn, Berman, . . .
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Nihilism & the Last Man
Regressive Narcissism and the
Culture of Consumption; Repressive
Desublimation; Disindividuation;
Neoliberalism
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Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .
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SOOL: The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
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" . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "
performative benchmarks: FDR; minutes spring division of Murray Body; Chrysler Exec Bd. and Shop Committees
Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological model of human development should be
understood as a representation of the workings of the biocultural niche
of modernity. Piaget-Luria-Ong provide us with the means to
analyze and evaluate actual cognitive-discursive performances.
(Dupre on variations within the smallest environments (family): this is
the caveat of fundamental importance.) Within the cognitive space of this model there are several niches.
It is in this context that one should apprehend Trump's meeting in the tank.
Jessica L. Navarro and Jonathan R. H. Tudge, "Technologizing
Bronfenbrenner: Neo-ecological Theory," (Current Psychology (2023)
42:19338–19354)
Bronfenbrenner’s theory, being fully developed by the turn of the cen-
tury (Rosa & Tudge, 2013), did not consider the impact of
developing in the digital age.
"Bored of the rings: Methodological and analytic approaches to
operationalizing Bronfenbrenner's PPCT model in research practice",
Jessica L. Navarro, Christina Stephens, Blenda C. Rodrigues, Indya A.
Walker, Olivia Cook, Leah O'Toole, Noírín Hayes, Jonathan R. H. Tudge
Journal of Family Theory & Review
First published: 13 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12459Citations: 6
Authors claim Bronf. emmpasized contexts over proximal processes
see Proximal Processes
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Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological model of human development
Bronfenbrenner, U., & Ceci, S. J. (1994). "Nature-nuture reconceptualized in developmental
perspective: A bioecological model." Psychological Review, 101(4), 568–586
Jessica L. Navarro and Jonathan R. H. Tudge, "Technologizing Bronfenbrenner: Neo-ecological Theory," (Current Psychology (2023) 42:19338–19354)
Bronfenbrenner’s theory, being fully developed by the turn of the century (Rosa & Tudge, 2013), did not consider the impact of developing in the digital age.
from
Urie Bronfenbrenner, ed., Making Human Beings Human: Bioecological
Perspectives on Human Development (Sage Publications, 2005)
The contemporary scientific study of human development is characterized
by a committment to the understanding of the dynamic relationships
between the developing individual and the integrated, multilevel
ecology of human development. This approach to development is marked
by a theoretical focus on temporally (historically) embedded
person-context relational process; by the embracing of models of
dynamic change across the ecological system; and by relational,
change-sensitive methods predicated on the idea that individuals
influence the people and institutions of their ecology as much as they
are influenced by them. (ix)
Especially in its early phases, but also throughout the life course,
human development takes place through processes of progressively more
complex reciprocal between an active, evolving biopsychosocial human
organism and the persons, objects and symbols in its immediate external
environment. (xviii)
Within the bioecological theory, develoment is defined as the
phenomenon of continuity and change in the biopsychological
characteristics of human beings both as individuals and as groups. The
phenomenon extends over the life course across successive generations
and through historical time both past and present. (3)
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BILDUNG
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Brain Plasticity and its Consequences
from John Dupré, "Causality and Human
Nature in the Social Sciences," in Processes
of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford,
2012).
It is . . . clear
that recognition of the variety of factors involved in development
makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite
narrowly defined populations. (285)
. . . the human mind . . . involves a new level of capacity
to transform the world beyond the organism. (291)
I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to
transform the developmental niche. And here, at least in
contemporary developed countries, it seems clear that humans have
learned in quite recent times to construct a remarkably novel
environment for the development of their young. . . . [T]hese
prodigious changes to the human environment, concretizations of our
rapidly evolving culture, profoundly affect the developmental resources
available to growing humans. For that reason their
introduction should be seen as representing major evolutionary change.
(284)
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BILDUNG
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Brain Plasticity and its Consequences
from Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2004)
But is there any
evidence that nonhuman primates may experience something akin to a
cultural shaping of their minds in the way Vygotsky implied for human
children? . . . . More recently, Tomasello (1999) has
emphasized the "socialization of attention" and cognition in general as
the explanation for higher achievements (by human standards) of
human-reared apes. Although the two approaches emphasize very
different factors, in fact from a Vygotskian perspective they are
complimentary. Vygotsky's view was that adult mediation was
optimally achieved through the use of signs and symbols, especially
speech and language. In his view, higher cognitive processes--the
processes that differentiate humans from other apes--could only be
created through this sociocultural mediation. The possibility
that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving
him, on the one hand, a regime of socally controlled attention and
interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more
explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support
to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through
cultural processes of develoment that change the nature of cognitive
ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)
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BILDUNG
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Brain Plasticity and its Consequences
from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2
.
. .
modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our
previous stages of cognitive evolution. It still rests on the
same old primate brain capacity for episodic or event
knowledge.
But it has three additional, uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an
oral-linguistic layer, and an external-symbolic layer. The
minds
of individuals reflect these three ways of representing
reality.
262
Something about our mentality changed in the past few millenia,
something that made us able to construct such exotic things as
symphonies, philosophies, oil refineries, nuclear weapons, and
robots. Do such achievements have implications for theories
of
consciousness? Many would deny that they do. They
would
claim that the parameters of mind were surely fixed long ago, when we
emerged as a species, and that culture can add nothing to an equation
written deeply into the human genome.
But that common belief does not stand up to
scrutiny. The
human mind has been drastically changed by culture. In modern
culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on
mental development than it was in the past. This may be a
direct
reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that
does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely
cognitive standpoint. The human mind is so plastic in the way
it
carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the
core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies
significantly as a function of different kinds of culture.
This
is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those
involved in formal thinking and representation.
Let me be very clear about what I mean here. I am not speaking of
trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language
use. These are by far the most common and have no proven
cognitive impact. The most important of these is literacy.
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and
deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate
individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered
two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the
other in groups.
To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural
demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy
training. This involves massive restructuring. There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. These are unnatural.
They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which
changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the
functional architecture of thought. This process can be very
extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on
the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several
different
technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These
skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the
person's mind carries out its work.
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Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)
Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture
Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have
all four stages simultaneously present.
Stage
|
Species/Period
|
Novel Forms
|
Manifest Change
|
Governance
|
EPISODIC
|
Primate
|
Episodic event perceptions
|
Self-awareness and event sensitivity
|
Episodic and reactive
|
MIMETIC
(first transition)
|
Early homids, peaking in
H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya
|
Action
metaphor
|
Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation
|
Mimetic style and archetypes
|
MYTHIC
(second transition)
|
Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present
|
Language, symbolic representation
|
Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought
|
Mythic framework of governance
|
THEORETIC
(third transition)
|
Modern culture
|
External symbolic universe
|
Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage
|
Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention
|
j
from
Merlin
Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human
cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive
evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the
Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61
Mimetic
representations are evident in human children before they acquire
language competence. . . . They continue to be important in
adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic
skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of
aggression or rejection).
Also : Kirsty E Graham 1, Catherine Hobaiter 1, Editor: Frans B. M. de Waal, "Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures" PLoS Biol. 2023 Jan 24 |
|
|
" . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "
ascism is not a thing. It is a concept. As a concept--often
nowadays just used as a shibboleth, and therefore not a concept at
all--it prefigures modes of comprehension and understanding enabling
sense-making
configurations of human capital and bio-ecological systems/bio-cultural niche.
the basics: Ong, Vygotsky, Luria; Donald; Piaget
There are no Cartesian selves, only action networks/networks of power.
Trump is in the limninal zone where logos of praxis cog-disc-perf is the beast//"Among humans . . . primate-style dominance is
periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and
restored again and again."
Modern history is all about power
the Slave Power: an Atlantic perspective
|
|
BILDUNG
By
encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that
literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might
transform both themselves and the world around them.
from
T.
Wilson Hayes, "The Peaceful Apocalypse: Familism and Literacy in
Sixteenth-Century England." The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 131-143 (13 pages)
. . . they believed that by reading they could learn how to save their own souls. p. 132
transformation of consciousness with the spread of alphabet literacy; Ong ref; p. 137
an internal transformation epitomized by the acquisition of literacy p. 141
In the sixteenth century literacy became a sign of independence. Unlike
inherited wealth or class, the acquisition of literacy showed that one
had the self-discipline to master an intellectual skill and enabled one
to absorb "new conceptions of the behavior appropirate for self-possessing individuals." p. 142
Like the Lollards before them, Familists did not advocate separation
from the dominant church and, as Champlin Burrage and David Loades have
pointed out, should not be referred to as a sect at all. By
encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that
literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might
transform both themselves and the world around them. This was a
key factor in the advancement of popular literacy and, as a result, of
popular political awareness. 143
from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)
We
have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser
extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to
self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and
autonomous individual. By contrast, the relation of the newly
literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new
forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to
entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100
Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between
individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that
genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only
where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of
demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling
persons. Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak
individuality are likely to be the result . . . 110
|
|
|
By
encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that
literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might
transform both themselves and the world around them.
|
On Becoming Communist: Flint, Michigan circa late 1940s
from an interview of Saul Wellman by Peter Friedlander:
Wellman:
Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the
roughest place to be. Now we recruited dozens of people to the
Party in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk. And those
are the best ones. But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long,
once they joined the Party. Because once they came to the Party a
whole new world opened up. New cultural concepts, new people, new
ideas. And they were like a sponge, you know. And Flint
couldn't give it to them. The only thing that Flint could give
you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see. So they would
sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they
might see a Russian film or they might . . . hear their first
opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people that they never
met with in their lives.
Friedlander: to me that's one of the most significant processes of people becoming radicals, is this . . .
SW: but you lose them in their area . . .
PF: right.
You lose them, but I think something is going on there that I think
radicals have not understood about their own movement . . .
SW: right . . .
PF: something about the urge toward self improvement . . .
SW: right . . .
and cultural advancement . . .
SW: right, right . . .
PF: and not to remain an unskilled worker in the asshole of the world . . .
SW: right,
right. But there are two things going on at the same time.
The movement is losing something when a native indigenous force leaves
his community. On the other hand the reality of joining a
movement of this type is that the guy who is in the indigenous area
looks around and says this is idiocy, I can't survive here.
|
ll
|
|
the biocultural niche of modernity in action: the view from the inside
intersubjectivity, shared intentionality, and the extended mind: how I became a participant-observer
(a critique of marxism)
masses, classes, and elites
Figure 1a is repeated here for reference. Praxiological ratios
are estimates of the strength of the Unity caucus at the time of the
Cleveland convention (March 1939).ht
through processes of progressively more
complex reciprocal between an active, evolving biopsychosocial human
organism and the persons, objects and symbols in its immediate external
environment. (xviii)
Within the bioecological theory, develoment is defined as the
phenomenon of continuity and change in the biopsychological
characteristics of human beings both as individuals and as
groups. The phenomenon extends over the life course across
successive generations and through historical time both past and
present. (3)
HUAC Hearing 1938
https://archive.org/stream/investigationofu193802unit/investigationofu193802unit_djvu.txt
|
|
Interrogating Dasein: bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts (a critique of marxism)
Figure 1a. The UAW-Unity
Caucus, 1933-1943
|
praxiological ratios
a. plebeian upstarts
1. the Joe Adams ratio: 10.6% (Dodge Main) PF
2. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2% (Buick) Skeels
3. the Bud Simons ratio: 7.5% (Fisher Body 1) Skeels
4. the Cliff Williams ratio: 7.1% (Pontiac Motors) PF
b. bildungsproletarians: about one in thousand
Dodge Main: 2 ratios (21,894 members in Fall 1939)
n=34. (0.16%): Emergency Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees, October 8, 1939
n=13 (0.06%): Meeting of the Chrysler Executive Boards and shop committees, November 7, 1939
|
Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"
1. encounters with "the grey masses"
a. patrimonial formations: gangs and grifters
b. Masons and K of C
c. the middle (hometownsmen): Elder, Wainwright
d. Polish women (Herman Burt)
e. workhorse uncle toms
f. Hillbillies
2. encounters with "the middling sort"
a. Ben Wainwright interview
b. the Elder report
3. encounters with the skilled trades
a. Mazey on the skilled trades in Briggs
b. Fagan on the "Americans": AAIA, KKK, Bl. Legion
c. Kluck on skilled trades: Homer Martin
d. Kord on the colonization of the tool room UNITY
4. encounters with plebeian upstarts
a. Bud Simons on Toledo flying squadron
b. Edmund Kord on guys from front welding
c. Edmund Kord on the youth "gangs" in the press
rooms
d. Bill Mazey and Joe Adams on the Italians
e. Frank Fagan on the welders in his department/body-
in-white
5. encounters with management
a. Earl Reynolds
b. Bud Simons and Frank Fagan
c. Murray Body spring committee
6. encounters with fascism*
a. Bud Simons experience in Saginaw
b. Victor Reuther experience in Anderson
c. Cliff Williams vs. Bert Harris
d. Packard
e. Maurice Sugar in the elevator
f. Lindahl on 1938 meeting (letter to Lewis)
|
Networks of Power
Reformation "Roots"
Jennifer A. Herdt, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago, 2019).
Esp. re. the role of Pietists in American Civil War (pp. 21,
59-60) england, netherlands, germany,.
Flint Fisher Body Roscoe
Van Zandt |
|
|
|
Bildung: The Republican Dasein and Modernist Sensibilities:
Schiller Hall in Detroit in the 1930s should be viewed as a radical salon,
a
node in the discursive field/biocultural niche of modernity
1. from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
We
have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser
extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to
self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and
autonomous individual.
2. Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as a radical salon, a
node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the
bildungsproletarians. Below (4), Ed Lock (proud grandson of a Civil War veteran) provides an
account
of
the intellectual life of the bildungs-proletarians who gathered in
Schiller
Hall. Saul Wellman (6) (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an
account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the
Party in Flint in the immediate post-war period. Joe Adams (7)
(socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist
sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the
socialists he knew back in the day. Excerpts from the Wellman and Adams interviews can be found here.
3. comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014:
Jacob's
emphasis on the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of
these first "industrialists"; her emphasis on the role of books as
emotionally charged world-opening objects--one sees here both
Vygotsky's notion of zone of proximal development broadened and
historicized, and Alcorn's understanding
of the development of self that can result from an an engagement with a
text. In this way Jacob expands our concept of the Enlightenment.
This requires a reconceptualization of what is called the
Enlightenment--the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental
leap--an ontological leap, a cognitive revolution, a new Symbolic
Order. The superorganisism of the enlightenment . . . from the 18th
century to the New Deal. Scientific reasoning is not merely about
knowledge. It is about functioning on the formal-operational level.
In the adventure of it, the jouissance of developmental transgression
and becoming, lies the secret of the bildungs-proletarians and plebeian
upstarts who gave us so many Nietzschean spectacles . . .
4. from my interview with Ed Lock (CP, UAW Local 600)
I was very active in MESA --- Ford in USSR petered out in March of 1933, and I was laid
off. Several months later I found employment in a job shop as a
milling machine operator. I got signed up in the MESA, that was a
unionized plant. The job didn't last long.
In that period I would hang out at the MESA hall, Schiller Hall* on
Gratiot Ave. . . It was very much a Left hall. I became very
interested in union . . . I was very young, 20 yrs old. My father was
AFL, a ship carpenter, but I didn't assimilate much from him. But I
became very interested in the MESA, and one of the characteristics of
the time was that large
numbers of radicals of all descriptions IWW, Communist, Socialist . . .
would come to this hall, and we would sort of sit around and have big
bull discussions with the old timers from the IWW and the Communists
and whoever was there . . . We would all participate in these
discussions, each of them would bring their literature round . . . I
got involved so to speak, I was unemployed, but I would still go
because I found these meetings fascinating, and I would participate in
the distribution of leaflets.
|
I would go out with some of the leaders, and go with John Anderson or
John Mack, who was a leader at that time. I went to--not so often to
Fords--but I went to the Cadillac plant, Ternstedt, places like this,
and GM, and would distribute organizational . . . I got involved in the
Detroit Stoveworks strike . . . The MESA had undertaken the
organization there and had a bitter strike there. A matter of fact I
had guns put in my ribs in this strike threatening to kill us. But
this was part of my education in the trade union movement.
5.
Karl Emil Franzos, "Schiller in Barnow" (1876), in The German Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993, Ritchie Robertson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999)
6. on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint immediate post-war years
Saul Wellman Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party
Wellman: Flint is what I
consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the roughest place to
be. Now we recruited dozens of people to the Party in Flint, and
they came out of indigenous folk. And those are the best
ones. But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long, once they
joined the Party. Because once they came to the Party a whole new
world opened up. New cultural concepts, new people, new
ideas. And they were like a sponge, you know. And Flint
couldn't give it to them. The only thing that Flint could give
you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see. So they would
sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they
might see a Russian film or they might . . . hear their first
opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people that they never
met with in their lives. . . .
On the other hand the
reality of joining a movement of this type is that the guy who is in
the indigenous area looks around and says this is idiocy, I can't
survive here.
7. Modernist Sensibilities on Detroit's East Side, circa 1930s
Joe Adams (Dodge Main Local 3, socialist) interview conducted around 1975-76
My background on
unionism. Mostly it was like on my dad with the newspaper
socialism. He believed in socialism. He used to sit there
and talk. I had seven brothers, and hell, the old man used to sit
down. He was a pretty intelligent guy, like the Reuther boys we
used to listen to the old man.”
Religion was a bunch of
bullshit. As a statesman Reuther got to be where he went to some
church and just went there once in a while just to make it look good,
but shit when he died he [they] let nobody near him—any of
them—godddamn rabbis or preists or ministers, he felt the same way
about all of them there like [Roy] and him, up your bunhole, just burn
it and get the hell over with it. That’s the way I feel about it.
“There are a
nucleus of people in any organization that make all organizations
function. I don’t care what you say. You can have a million
members and there can be fifty of them that makes the UAW function,
which is what happened there for the last thirty five years. The
Reuthers, the Woodcocks, myself. You know when a guy like me
brings in 250,000 members into this goddamn union he has to have a
semblance of some intelligence. he just can’t go out and say ‘I’m
an organizer’. In Patterson NJ there was 32,000 people in Wright
Aeronautical, and I got 23,000 votes out of them people for the UAW.
|
|
|
Michigan Steel Tube (UAW Local 238)
|
|
Midland Steel: Layout with Work-Flow (drawn by Art Lamb, Works Manager)
In this interview Joe Bidinger describes the step-by-step movement of metal
from raw input to finished output.
|
|
Midland Steel: the Last Frame
|
|
|
|
|
|
Analyzing Power Relations: Five Frameworks
Deleuze & Guattari:
Vincent/McMahon:
Piaget/Vygotsky/Luria:
Michael Mann:
P. Friedlander: |
Three regimes (primitive, despotic, capitalist)
Left vs. Right: (topologies of the two-party system)
Cognitive modalities (topologies of the two-party system)
Four networks of power
Five genetic ontologies (topologies of the two-party system) |
|
|
Fascism
|
Talkin' Shit, Eternal Return, and "Fascism"
from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004)
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. (emphasis added)
|
1. *Anindya Bhattacharyya, "Notes on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence" and Christian Emden, Nietzsche's Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014)
|
|
|
Fascism in Flint and Pontiac, 1937
Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text
"Lynching" in Fisher Body press room, June 10, 1937, Pontiac
"Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" Detroit News 12-10-37
Travis reports
Bus Simons on Bert Harris and the Black Legion
Addes Report April to June 1939 (Zaremba, box 6, Reuther Archives)
Geiger-Case-Mortimer-Addes Report
(Henry Kraus Collection, Reuther Archives)
March, September 1938; January 1939)
The Harry Elder Report, September 2, 1939 (Detroit Regional Office, NLRB, in Smith Committee Files, National Archives, Washington, D.C.)
Interviews, Cliff Williams, Pontiac Yellow Truck: January to December, 1974
Interviews re. Roscoe vanZandt (Jones, Bully, Kraus/Leighton)
|
The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity: conspiracy theories
deep structure
|
|
The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes II
Elites and their Masses
see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
MSNBC/CNN/
New York
Times/Washington Post
NIHILISM (Liberalism)
BILDUNG (Progressivism)
Commercial republicanism Civic republicanism
concrete-operational
and
formal-operational and
pre-operational
concrete operational
Fox News
RESSENTIMENT
Fascism
pre-operational and gestural
rentier sectors; provincial capitals; patrimonial
and predatory businesses and racist political ecologies
|
|
The two-party System: Semiotic Regimes I
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations
|
LEFT*
|
RIGHT
|
Topology
|
depressive
|
paranoid-schizoid
|
Political style
|
progressive
|
proto-Dorian
|
Cognitive mode
|
concrete & pre-op
|
pre-op and gestural
|
Regime type
|
rational-bureaucratic
|
patrimonial
|
|
Commodities in International Trade
|
Securities Bloc
|
Mass Consumption I: Mass Distribution & Mass Housing
|
Mass Consumption II: Captive Production Inputs
|
Modern Machinery & Continuous Process Multinationals
|
Post-modern Capitalism: the Production of Subjectivities
FF-FDR on forces
|
|
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
(a critique of marxism)
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
KE2019
The New Deal and Capitalism (notes)
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
|
|
Thermidor
from industrial production: 100 year historical-chart
|
|
|
|
Future Forward PAC (2024)
Contributor
|
Firm
|
Amount
|
Michael Bloomberg
|
Bloomberg Inc.
|
$19,000,000
|
Dustin A. Moskovitz
| Asana
| $48,000,000
|
James Simmons
|
Euclidean Capital
|
$9,100,000
|
Reid Hoffman
|
Greylock
|
$9,000,000
|
Christian Larsen
|
Ripple
|
$8,414,950
|
Jay Robert Pritzker
|
Hyatt Corp.
|
$5,000,000 |
Marc Stad
|
The Dragoneer Investment Group
|
$5,000,000
|
Rory John Gates
|
|
$3,000,000
|
Sixteen Thirty FundDM
|
dark money
|
$3,000,000
|
Martha Karsh
|
Oaktree Capital
|
$3,000,000 |
Fred Eychaner
|
News Web Corp.
|
$7,000,000
|
Kenneth Duda
|
Arista Networks Inc.
|
$2,000,000
|
Eric Schmidt
|
Alphabet Inc.
|
$1,600,000
|
Reed Hastings
|
Netflix
|
$1,000,000
|
Jeffrey Lawson
|
Twilio
|
$1,000,000
|
Erica Lawson
|
U. of Cal. SF
|
$1,000,000
|
|
|
|
|
Source. "How Other Nations Pay for Childcare. The U.S. is an Outlier" (New York Times, October 6, 2021)
|
Psychometrics ("Q"): Flynn, Nisbett, Ceci; Hernstein and Murray
•IQ tests
•PISA
•MEAP
|
Evolutionary: Donald, Mind: cognitive evolution Table 7.1 p. 260
•episodic (primate)
•mimetic (homo erectus, h. sapients)
•oral-mythic (h. sapiens sapiens)
•theoretic (required by modern capitalism*)
•post-theoretic (Foucault, Sellars, Deleuze)
|
Developmental: Piaget et. al.
•pre-operational
•concrete operrational
•formal operational
•post-formal thought (Commons)
|
Psychoanalytic: Freud-Klein: mechanisms of defense
•projection
•displacement
•reaction formation
•denial
•identification
|
Cultural-historical: Vygotsky, Luria, Ong, Bruner, Flynn, Tomasello. The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
• zone of proximal development
• joint intentionality
• intersubjectivity
• niche construction
|
|
Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)
Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture
Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have
all four stages simultaneously present.
Stage
|
Species/Period
|
Novel Forms
|
Manifest Change
|
Governance
|
EPISODIC
|
Primate
|
Episodic event perceptions
|
Self-awareness and event sensitivity
|
Episodic and reactive
|
MIMETIC
(first transition)
|
Early homids, peaking in
H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya
|
Action
metaphor
|
Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation
|
Mimetic style and archetypes
|
MYTHIC
(second transition)
|
Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present
|
Language, symbolic representation
|
Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought
|
Mythic framework of governance
|
THEORETIC
(third transition)
|
Modern culture
|
External symbolic universe
|
Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage
|
Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention
|
j
from Merlin
Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human
cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive
evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61
Mimetic
representations are evident in human children before they acquire
language competence. . . . They continue to be important in
adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic
skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of
aggression or rejection).
Kirsty E Graham 1,*, Catherine Hobaiter 1,* Editor: Frans B M de Waal2, "Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures" PLoS Biol. 2023 Jan 24
|
|
|
Lower Great Lakes Industrial Region
Interviews (Skeels, Friedlander, Leighton): Lower Great Lakes Industrial Region
| Detroit-east side
|
|
interviewees
|
|
|
|
Murray Body
|
UAW Local 2
|
Pody, Fagan, Jones
|
Dodge Main
|
UAW Local 3
|
Frankensteen, Watson, Ross, Harris, Adams, Ptazynski, Reynolds, Zaremba
|
Plymouth
|
UAW Local 51
|
NLRB, Sweet, bus.hist.,
|
Packard
|
UAW Local 190
|
McDaniel, Kujawski, Matthews, Poplewski,Lindahl
|
Michigan Steel Tube
|
UAW Local 238 |
Klue (Emergence of as UAW Local)
|
Detroit Steel Products
|
UAW Local 351
|
Silver
|
Midland Steel
|
UAW Local 410
|
N=24
|
Chrysler Highland Park
|
UAW Local 490
|
Jenkins
|
|
|
|
| Detroit-Connor Ave
|
|
interviewees
|
Chrysler-Jefferson
|
UAW Local 7
|
Zeller, Carey
|
Hudson
|
UAW Local 154
|
Anderson, Moore, Pody
|
Briggs
|
UAW Local 212
|
Bill Mazey, Ernie Mazey, Morris, Vega
|
Budd Wheel
|
UAW 306
|
Bauer
|
|
|
|
| Detroit-west side and Dearborn
|
|
interviewees |
Ford
|
UAW Local 600
|
Lock, Llewelyn, Tappes
|
Fleetwood
|
UAW Local 15
|
Anderson
|
Ternstedt
|
UAW Local 174
|
|
|
UAW Local 157
|
|
|
|
|
Flint
|
|
|
Fisher Body 1
|
|
Genski, Simons
|
Chevrolet
|
|
Jones
|
Buick
|
|
Bully, Case
|
A.C. Spark Plug
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Pontiac |
|
|
GM Truck & Bus
|
|
Williams et. al. |
| Fisher Body |
|
Williams et. al. |
| Pontiac Motors |
|
Williams et. al. |
|
|
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Toledo
|
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Auto-Lite
|
|
|
Chevrolet
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Ditzel, Roland
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Willys-Overland
|
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Addes
|
Spicer Mfg.
|
|
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City Auto Stamping
|
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Logan Gear Co
|
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Bingham Stamping and Tool
|
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South Bend
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Bendix
|
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Studebaker
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Rightly
|
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Milwaukee
|
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Allis-Chalmers
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Meyer, Stalin Over Wisconsin: the Making and unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950 (Rutgers, 1992)
|
Seaman Body
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Speth
|
|
|
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Cleveland
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Fisher Body
|
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White Motor
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Mortimer
|
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Copperheads
Cleveland and the First Lincoln Election: The Ethnic Response to Nativism
Thomas W. Kremm,
Published 22 January 1977
Frank Baron, Abraham Lincoln and the German Immigrants: Turners and Forty-Eighters (Kansas, 2012), p. 18
Turners, Forty-Eighters, and Pietists (Unity caucus)
Catholics: German and Irish (Copperheads)
Catholics and Radicals: The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists and
the American Labor Movement, from Depression to Cold War Hardcover –
January 1, 1981
by Douglas P. Seaton (Author)
-----
"The
Irish people are among our bitterest persecutors." Frederick Douglass's
Irish Odyssey", p. xv. Lecture Brooklyn May 15, 1863 (More on Democrats and Irish, pp. 175-79); also p. 15
"After all, abolitionism was a cause largely identified with Protestant and Dissenting religions . . . " p. 97
|
|
Midland Steel, UAW Local 410
1. The AFL Faction: the Non-Production Craft and Service Sector
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
|
|
|
|
|
| Oran Snyder
| German
| Catholic
|
| repair weld
| assembly
| Glen Snyder
| German
| Catholic
|
| repair weld
| assembly
| Anton Boll
| German/Kashub?
| Catholic
|
| die maker
| tool room
| Frrank Carr
| Irish
| Catholic
|
| crib clerk
| tool room
| Joseph Bergeron
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
|
| tool welder
| tool room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| F. Bieske
| German
| Catholic
|
| plumber
| maintenance
| Fred Kraus
| German
| Catholic
|
| pipefitter
| maintenance | F. Mathews
| Irish
| Catholic
|
| millwright
| maintenance
| A. Dumais
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
|
| electrician
| maintenace
| Carl Brendel
| German
| Catholic
|
| plumber
| maintenace |
|
|
|
|
|
| J. Killala
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1899
| crane operator
| transportation
| William Babcock
| German
| Catholic
|
| crane operator | transportation | Junius Pruitt
| Black
|
|
| tractor driver
| transportation |
|
|
|
|
|
| Pete Olshove
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1898
| hyd. press die set
| press room
| Agnes Baaranski
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1900
| press operator
| press room
| Marie Budna
| Czech
| Catholic
|
| press operator
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| H. L. Harris
| Black
|
| 1891
| Hannifin op.
| assembly
| A. M. Smith
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1910
| arc welder
| assembly
|
u
2. The CIO Milieu: Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
|
|
|
|
|
| North European
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Thomas Dyer
| Ky. Mason
|
|
| die maker
| tool room
| Sam Brear
| Scot//Czech |
|
| machine hand
| tool room
| A. Barton
| Indiana WASP
|
|
| diie maker
| tool room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Ben Wainwright
| Pa. English
|
|
| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud English
| WASP RR Okla
|
| 1906
| arc welder
| assembly
| Norm Green
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
| 1912
| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud Berkey
| Pa. WASP
|
| 1904
| arc welder
| assembly
| John Fisher
| Scotch
|
| 1897
| spot welder
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| G. Watson
|
|
|
| press operator
| press room
| Mac Mackelvey
| Scot
|
|
| press operator
| press room
| A. Fritche
| German
|
| 1899
| large press op.
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| THE LEFT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Bill Sumak
| Russian
|
| 1897
| press operator
| press room
| George Borovich
| Serb
|
| 1913
| press operator
| press room
| Fred Cini
| Maltese
|
| 1905
| press operator
| press room
| James Dinkle
| Germ/Kashub
|
| 1910
| press operator
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| John Kazmierski
| Polish
|
| 1912 | Proj. welder | assembly
| Peter Borovich
| Serbian
|
| 1914 | arc welder
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Peter Kotenko
| Russian
|
| 1915
| labor
| transportation
|
|
|
|
|
|
| THE SECOND GENERATION
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| John Kazmierski
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ed Grabowski
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ted Maciag
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Frank Kusz
| Polish
|
| 1896
| arc welder | assembly | Chester Podorski
| Polish
|
| 1917
| Hannifin op
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Oscar Oden
| Black
|
| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Warfield
| Black
|
| 1896
| assembler
| assembly
| Nelson Merrill
| Black
|
| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Patterson
| Black
|
| 1902
| assembler
| assembly
| Edgar Hicks
| Black
|
| 1891
| hannifin op
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
cognitive-discursive performativities of the two-party system: the Congressional debate on the auto industry bailout, 2008
Consider
the 2008 Congressional debate on the auto industry bailout.
Democrats refered to the input-output matrix of auto production (supply
chain +) in the United States, and expressed concerns about the systems
impact of an auto industry collapse. Their cognitive operations
were focused on facts and concepts appropriate to a discussion of
economic policy.
On the other hand,
the GOP confined itself to primarily moralistic arguments and
accusations about rewarding the bad behavior of auto executives.
Of course the attacks on Detroit, as the iconic symbol of blacks and
unions, were just one more instance of the sado-sexual eigenvector of
GOP performativity. Absent from the set of GOP rhetorical
elements were economic data and economic concepts--a striking omission
in a debate on economic policy. GOP economic policy statements
are nothing more than the shibboleths of a provincial Protestantism,
and ought not be taken as real conceptualizations of things
economic.
This is only the beginning of a critique of the cognitive-discursive
performativities of our time and place. Today (June 4, 2025),
having watched many Youtube videos featuring the m*rx*sts Richard Wolff
and Yanis Varoufakis. This has led me to the following formultion:
M*rx*sm,
in their cognitive-discurive practice, is still stuck on Hegel's "the
real is rational and the rational real." Thus, Richard Wolff sees
both 1) a real strategic purpose to Trump's praxis (despite incoherence
and impulsiveness of Trump, there is some kind of logic of
capital operating in the formation of policy), and 2) the hope that
homo sapiens inherent rationality will make itself felt in the 2026
Congressional elections.
re. the China syndrome
in this regard McMahon
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|
