A close look at the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the Chicago Study¹ and the New York Times, 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^,"2 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 classifications³ 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.  (See Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol. Merge with Fascism: Data).  This is the sociological mire out of which emerged the mob of Jan 6.  A psychoanalytic discussion of the dialectic between Trump and his supporters is provided by Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018).  This brief essay ought to be read immediately.  (See also Wilbur Cash on the proto-dorian convention)

The language of these arrestees can be seen here: Semiotic Regimes/telephone threats.

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1.  The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats: The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement (Update of 2=5=21).
2. "From Navy Seal to Part of  the Angry Crowd Outside the Capitol" (the New York Times, January 26, 2021)
3.  North American Industry Classification System (U.S. Census Bureau)
     Standard Occupational Classification System (Bureau of Labor Statistics

from Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape (pp. 128-9)

from The Social Origins of Language (Cambridge, 2014)

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

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.” 

Religion is another case in point.  In the traditional view, eighteenth-century progressive ideologies were anti-religious; few of the philosophes were outright atheists but most of them were harshly critical of the church as an instititution and eager to relegate religion to the margins of human affairs.  The Revolution, in this older view, was the outcome of secularizing forces.  More recent work has shown, however, that religion was a central component of oppositional activity and ideas in the pre-revolutionary decades.  In the early eighteenth century, the groups most conspicuously persecuted by the French monarchy were Protestants (whose right to worship was outlawed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685), and followers of Jansenism, a Catholic heresy with Augustinian roots which became popular among some segments of the French noble and commoner elites and eventually among broad segments of the urban population in the first half of the eighteenth century.  While exile and brutal repression mostly silenced the Huguenot community, recent research has shown that Jansenists and their supporters played a pivotal role in undermining the ideological alliance of church and throne, and indeed the very justification for traditional monarchy.

As Dale Van Kley has argued in a series of classic studies, the church, the First Estate of the realm, had less to fear from Voltaire  and company’s rather traditional caricatures of lascivious monks, debauched nuns, and power hungry popes than from a high-minded Catholic movement with powerful supporters which proposed a coherent alternative view of the nature of both religious and secular power (Van Kley 1996).  Jansenism, a movement resembling Protestantism but which professed loyalty to the Catholic Church, took shape in the mid-seventeenth century, and by the reign of Louis XIV the heresy had a committed following among the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris and the capital’s parish clergy. . . .  The Parlement of Paris, home to a number of prominent Jansenist magistrates and smarting from Louis XIV attack on its traditional “right of remonstrance,” took it upon itself to defend Jansenist priests from persecution, thereby setting the stage  for some fifty years of conflict between itself and the monarchy over religious affairs. . . .  In sum, it now seems that religion was a far more powerful force than Voltairean skepticism in undermining the ideological status quo.  It was, for instance, not the philosophes but a phalanx of determined Jansenist magistrates in the Paris Parlement who engineered the expulsion of the Jesusit order from France in 1764.

Most of the central political concepts of the Revolution were first articulated, then, not in the writings of canonical philosophes but in the fractious zone, primarily centered on the Parlement of Paris, where religion met politics.    (Rousseau’s overly radical and abstract Social Contract was virtually ignored before the 1790s.)   The most serious political crisis of the pre-revolutionary decades unfolded from 1771 to 1774 when Louis XV’s minister Chancellor René de Maupeou forcibly “reformed” the Parlement of Paris, radically curtailing its jurisdiction, severely restricting its right to to opine on national affairs, and summarily dismissing those many magistrates who refused to go along with his project.  The so-called “Maupeou crisis” touched off an avalanche of political commentary, with hundreds of pamphlets hammering out concepts and slogans that would become ubiquitous again in the late 1780s.

Certainly, empirical research does not support a class-based interpretation of the conflict that emerged in England in the 1640s.  If there was a difference between which side to support in the first English Civil War from 1642 to 1647, it was less based on class or even region but on religion.  The king's firm supporters were generally committed to the form of Anglicanism that Charles I supported while his opponents tended to be Puritans of some sort." p.49

Certainly, empirical research does not support a class-based interpretation of the conflict that emerged in England in the 1640s.  If there was a difference between which side to support in the first English Civil War from 1642 to 1647, it was less based on class or even region but on religion.  The king's firm supporters were generally committed to the form of Anglicanism that Charles I supported while his opponents tended to be Puritans of some sort." p.49

praxiological ratios

Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"

1.  encounters with "the grey masses"

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

6.  encounters with fascism*

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* see Fascism: texts

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.



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.