o
Still Life with Burning Candle, 1627 Pieter Claesz

Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home (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.
The Adventures of Dasein:
From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States

Go Fish

BangNEW
o
Philosophy always arrives too late. . . .  The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk
begins to fall.

the Cartesian myth

History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time.  [merge with philonotebookB]  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.

The materials at the right are indicative of the general orientation of this site.  The excerpt from Roper's Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany shows us that the “conspiracy theories” of today are not theories at all, but primitive semiotic gestures.  The New York Times article takes us from the mid-sixteenth century in Germany to the early twenty first century in in the United States . . .

The Sahlins excerpt provides a framework for thinking about the relationship between biology and culture.

 On this page I have assembled the key graphic materials.  The reader should scroll down . . .

Because a rhizome is always and everywhere unfinished . . .

Concrete Universal1, Romantic Science2, and Transcendental Empiricism3
1.  Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (1958)
2.  Luria/Proctor
3.  Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
from Fredrich 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 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)

from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51 Penguin)

To this extent media discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains anything but nonsense.  But as semiotics it remains of incaculable value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to "understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language, merely sympomology . . .

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.

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.”

Proctor, Hannah (2016) "Revolutionary thinking: a theoretical history of Alexander Luria’s ’Romantic science’". [Thesis] (Unpublished) Birkbeck, University of London



Figure 0. The Adventures of Dasein: From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
o
                        UAW Unity Caucus, 1936-39                                                                Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower's Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy   ●


Part One: A Reconceptualization of Modernity as a
Mode of Cognitive-Discursive Performativity

 the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive
performativities of modernity
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. 

Figure 0.  The Adventures of Dasein: From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, places our current situation in its biocultural and evolutionary context.  Figure 0 developed as a result of my encounter with The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014) and Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 2010). The  The Social Origins of Language  is of singular importance, so much so that I have assembled three sets of excerpts: a compressed summary; brief excerpts; and extended excerpts (click on Language-Thinking-Education).  Its key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.  Lyons' History of Reading and Writing should be situated in the context of this work.

Bildung, Literacy and Brain Plasticity:
On Reading as a Transformative Process

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.")

t

This site is a rhizome.

Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.1

It uses figurative elements, including  graphs, tables, charts, and maps, originally to advance an analysis of the historical trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump, but the events of the second decade of the 21st century, when viewed through the lens provided by The Social Origins of Language, forced me to see that there was a bigger picture.  This bigger picture is represented by Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States.

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. 

The results of this approach are startling in their implications.  Taking into account the major perspectives on the development of language and cognition, and applying these results and methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativity of "Trump", 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.
1.  See below





Figure 1a.  Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
pp

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

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
1.  Transcendental Empiricism
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 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 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.  141





Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
p
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook



Maza describes the biocultural niche of modernity as networks of
power-discourse that comprised the axis of praxis central to what has become known as the French Revolution.

phenomenological bundles
The building blocs of this site I call phenomenological bundles.  Two such bundles appear to the upper right: the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, and the UAW Unity caucus, 1933-1943.

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.

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.




 

Philosophy always arrives too late. . . . 
The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

"The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West."

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."), at least in the United States. 

Lyons's A History of Reading and Writing was published in 2010; I read it at the end of 2019.  E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was first published in 1963; I read it  some time around 1970.  C.B. Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism was published in 1962; I read it around 1970.  What struck me about Thompson's book was the intense literary activity of the artisans, shopkeepers, and workers about whom he wrote--which I now subsume under the concept of cogntive-discursive performativity.  Macpherson is important because this book gave me the intellectual weapon with which to combat the Cartesian Myth, especially when read in conjunction with Wittgenstein's Philosopical Investigations.  But it is Lyons who provides a framework within which these works can be considered.

 This disintegration of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity is one of the four major axes of the implosion of neo-liberal "society."1 The term "society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the term, an ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this society is in the process of blowing its brains out.
1.  the other three:
       the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP;
       the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions;
       and the triumph of nihilism.




The ever-expanding free-wheeling exercise of corporate power in the creation of the subjectivities of disindividuation . . . and the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity
Below are links to to the New York Times articles re. the ouster of Joe Biden as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, and a link to the OpenSecrets.Org file on the leading Democratic fundraising PAC, Future Forward.  To the right (➘)  is a list of the first 16 contributors that appear in the OpenSecrets.org list organized by size of contribution. 




The triumph of nihilism
The triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation.  Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism.  The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens into a proliferation of effects.  DSM-51 as the operating manual of the post-human ontology.  Homo sapiens is now becoming a collection of hapless blobs of protoplasm gulping down vast quantities of salt, fat, and sugar; of psychoactive drugs both legal and otherwise; of ego-boosting and self-forming fashion statements; of life experiences (Viking River Cruises), all the while wallowing in media-provided concoctions of all kinds, from Downton Abbey and Housewives of Beverly Hills to the Jerry Springer Show and Duck Dynasty. This ever-expanding free-wheeling exercise of corporate power in the creation of the subjectivities of disindividuation becomes an "issue" unlike any other that homo sapiens has ever faced before.  This infinite differentiability of this uniquely bio-cultural historical species is what gives capitalism its "vitality."  It is what Marxists, with their obsession with the crisis of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, characteristically fail to grasp.2 (sapient paradox; Kagan; Dupre; Simondon)

from Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010).
We are changing, of course, but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing.  Combined with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest in psychic disorders.  It can be heard from all quarters, and it takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and tranquility.  Today, many of our socials tensions have been expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse [liberalism/nihilism] or, in a similar way, its flip side: [fascism/ressentiment and the mechanisms of defence] explosions of violence, rage, the search for new sensations.  pp. 185-6

[liberalism/nihilismy] As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack of feeling.  Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the displacement of the hard task of being healthy.  In a context in which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.  Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to act.  p. 232
1. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.)  American Psychiatric Association
2. See Tod McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016)  It is from this standpoint of the problematic of the infinite differentiability of contemporary homo sapiens that the question of human ontology arises in its most urgent form.




The New Deal is deader than a dooornail:
the Significance of Biden's Ouster
Elite in action: the Democratic Party in Crisis (the July crisis)
Future Forward USA PAC Donors  (2024) (Compare this with Priorities USA (2022); also  Priorities USA  (2016)
A Hollywood Heavyweight Is Biden’s Secret Weapon Against Trump (NYT June 13, 2024)
The longtime movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg always sought scary villains for his films. Now he has found what he considers a real-life one in Donald J. Trump.

George Clooney: I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee. (NYT July 10, 2024)
George Clooney, a Major Biden Fund-Raiser, Urges Him to Drop Out (NYT July 10, 2024)

Mr. Clooney, who co-hosted a lavish fund-raiser for President Biden last month, wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times that Democrats “are not going to win in November with this president.”
How Biden Lost George Clooney and Hollywood (NYT July 11, 2024)

The president’s stable of big donors, corralled in part by the movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, has been devastated since his debate, with many closing their wallets.


Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris (NYT 10-17-24)
Future Forward has ascended to the top of the Democratic political universe, but it has also drawn suspicion and second-guessing.





The Democratic Party is the Party of Decognification
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (NYT October 26, 2018)
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”

"American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows" NYT jan 29, 2025
With little post-pandemic recovery, experts wonder if screen time and school absence are among the causes.

‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?

"Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime"
NYT April 10, 2025



Michel Desmurget, Screen Damage: The Dangers of Digital Media for Children (Polity, 2022)

Diane Ravitch, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Schools (Vintage, 2020)

Journey of billionaire Bill Gates's only son from lavish estate to low-key life (VnExpress, June 14, 2024)
Even with their wealthy lifestyle, Bill and Melinda ensured their three kids adhered to certain rules: no mobile phones until they turned 14 and nightly dishwashing duties.  When the children eventually received their phones, they were subject to strict guidelines, such as not being able to use phones at the dinner table and having their screen time closely regulated.



Future Forward PAC
Contributor
 Occupation
 Praxis
 Amount
Michael Bloomberg
 Bloomberg Inc.
 privately held financial, software, data, and media company
$19,000,000
Dustin A. Moskovitz
Asana
software company based in San Francisco whose flagship Asana service is a web and mobile "work management" platform designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.
$10,000,000
$10,000,000
$10,000,000
$5,000,000
$5,000,000
$5,000,000
$3,000,000
James Simmons
 Euclidean Capital
  James Harris Simons (April 25, 1938 – May 10, 2024) was an American hedge fund manager, investor, mathematician, and philanthropist.  He was the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund. $6,600,000
$2,500,000
Reid Hoffman
 Greylock
 venture capital firm.  The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software.
 $6,000,000
$3,000,000
Christian Larsen
 Ripple
 Ripple is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial services. Send cross-border payments in real-time , engage with tokenization and digital assets, and meet regulatory compliance requirements—all in one place.
 $5,444,975
$2,969,975
Jay Robert Pritzker
 Hyatt Corp.
 a founder of the Hyatt Corporation, having purchased the first Hyatt Hotel in 1957, and responsible for the corporation's evolution into a multinational hospitality conglomerate.
 $5,000,000
Marc Stad
 The Dragoneer Investment Group
 Marc Stad is a tech investor and the founder of Dragoneer Investment Group, which manages over $23 billion in assets. He has backed companies like Airbnb, DoorDash and Uber, and was the youngest Commissioner in San Francisco's history.
 $5,000,000
Rory John Gates

$3,000,000
Sixteen Thirty FundDM
 dark money
 Soros et. al.
 $3,000,000
Martha Karsh
 Oaktree Capital
 Since its formation in 1995, Oaktree has become the largest distressed-debt investor in the world. . . .  Oaktree's clientele includes 65 of the 100 largest U.S. pension plans, 40 state retirement plans in the United States, over 500 corporations and/or their pension funds, over 275 university, charitable and other endowments and foundations, and 16 sovereign wealth funds.[18][19][20] According to The Wall Street Journal, Oaktree has "long been considered a stable repository for pension-fund and endowment money."
 $3,000,000
Fred Eychaner
 News Web Corp.
 Newsweb Corporation is a printer of ethnic and alternative newspapers in the United States, based in Chicago, Illinois. The company also owns AM 750 WNDZ. Newsweb was founded in 1971 by Chicago entrepreneur, political activist, and philanthropist Fred Eychaner to continue his printing business.
 $3,000,000
$2,000,000
$2,000,000
Kenneth Duda
 Arista Networks Inc.
 Arista Networks, Inc. is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking for large datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and high-frequency trading environments.
 $2,000,000
Eric Schmidt
 Alphabet Inc.
 Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Apple, and one of the world's most valuable companies.[2][3] It was created through a restructuring of Google, . . . [and] is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
 $1,600,000
Reed Hastings
 Netflix
 Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages.
 $1,000,000
Jeffrey Lawson
 Twilio
 Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
 $1,000,000
Erica Lawson
 U. of Cal. SF
$1,000,000




America First!
from Mark E. Neely Jr., "Apotheosis of a Ruffian: The Murder of Bill Pool and American Political Cuture," in A Poltical Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History (U. of Va. Press, 2012), p. 59.
We might well see these political street gangs as the forerunners of the sinister enforcers who formed an essential part of the ultranationalist fascist parties of the next century: Brownshirts, Blackshirts, and the like.  In other words, America's most successful party of ethnic nationalism [the Know-nothings 1854-58] included forerunners of the street violence of the twentieth century's parties of pathological nationalism.

from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):

It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. . . .  The first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. p. 49





Fascism in Flint and Pontiac, 1937
l
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

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 leading to the Roscoe vanZandt wormhole (Jones, Bully, Kraus/Leighton)


Approaching Fascism Immanently:Four Phenomenological Bundles
1. the mob at the capitol
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity)
The language of these arrestees can be seen here: telephone threats.
The theoretical resources re. cognitive-discursive performativity. 
These resources deployed: From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment

 3.  The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
the innermost soul of fascist politics (SOOL, de Waal, and Nell; Frassetto, Deane, Given, and Roper; Nietzsche; Bernstein and Dostoevsky; and Lillian Smith)

The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity, Decoding the Semiosphere: Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense

4. state of the art scholarship

Up-to-date scholarly texts that directly address fascism, grouped as elements in a phenomenological bundle (Paxton-Eley-Stone): Fascism Reconsidered and Fascism readings

Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360). 

Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 20



Fascism in Packard, circa 1942
l
  Preferment of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt Murdock,
President of PACKARD LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the
local Headquarters at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in Detroit, Michigan. 
April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M. (Buehrle v. Murdock proceedings, 1942,
Reuther Archives, Lindahl Collection, Box 5)
New York Times, 1971kk       

Interviews: Williams, Jenkins

Patrimonialism in its evolutionary context

Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures

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).

Testimony of James Lindahl
James Lindahl:

We didn't become aware of the importance of the Klan until the Buffalo convention [sixth annual convention, August 1941].  At that time we discovered that the Klan with the UAW locals had become strong enough to have a large number of delegates at that convention.  After the Buffalo convention, apparently made bold by their numbers at the convention, they came. in the open, and that's when we first became aware of Buehrle as a driving force in the Klan. . . .  In my opinion, Brother Buehrle was the organizer of all the anti-negro sentiment in the plant.  He was the organizer of the threatened riot in the polishing room in defense, which compelled the steward to send the two negro polishers back to their original department.  The Kan was responsible for building up the anti-negro sentiment, so that you had in this very hall, expressions against the negro people, expressions against permitting them their democratic rights under the constitution, under the By-Laws of this organization.  The Klan was responsible, because every member of the Klan was among the most vocal and the most vicious in attacking the notion that the negro workers should have the right to go on better jobs, transfer into defense.  The Klan was the spearhead.  Then we openly fought the Klan, exposing the membership, denouncing it, and consequently all members of the Klan ran for cover.  We found that with them had gone all the organized opposition to the negro.






Interrogating Dasein: bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts
Figure 1a. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943
h
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
o


Reformation "Roots"
h
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



g
Part Three: Elites & Elite Configurations




McMahan

("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West")

Modernity, Bildung and Brain Plasticity

The Literacies of modernity (the cog-disc performativities of our times): pre- and post-modern literacies (Beowoulf to Tik Tok)

the limitations of literacy as narrowly conceived cocept

Bildung and "Literacy"

Racism vs. Brain Plasticity

Journey of billionaire Bill Gates's only son from lavish estate to low-key life
By Minh Hieu   June 14, 2024 | 06:22 pm PT

Even with their wealthy lifestyle, Bill and Melinda ensured their three kids adhered to certain rules: no mobile phones until they turned 14 and nightly dishwashing duties.  When the children eventually received their phones, they were subject to strict guidelines, such as not being able to use phones at the dinner table and having their screen time closely regulated.






Three Elite Configurations (1877-1938):
Commodities in International Trade, the Securities bloc, and the  Keynesian Elite
Elites are in part defined by the input-ouput matrices (really existing markets, praxiological flows) of the major sectors of the American political economy (Fig. 1).  Such matrices are shorthand ways of referring to inputs of money, raw materials, intermediate goods, and services; and outputs of raw materials, intermediate goods, finished goods, and services.

Commodities in International Trade includes much of the transportation and services infrastructure primarily dependent on such trade and thus belongs to the imput-output matrix of the latter: shipping, railroad, insurance, legal and other services.  (W. Averill Harriman Wiki article).  Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: from Depression to New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1977), although not conceptualizing it as such, gives a compelling description of Commodities in International Trade in action around the candidacies of Al Smith and Newton Baker (Cleveland Trust; Coca Cola; railroads).  Also see Irving Katz, August Belmont: a political biography (Columbia University Press, 1968).

The Securities bloc was the object of analysis by Louis D. Brandeis in his book Other People's Money.  Brandeis used the results of the Pujo Committee's Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in the United States (see Pujo Committee Interlocking Directorates 1912).  A defining moment in the conflict between the emerging mass consumption sector and the Securities bloc was the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, out of which emerged the Taylor Society.  (see unfinished tables HERE.)

Post-war configurations: Hiss List (defeat of the New Deal: globalization*
* global trade is not incompatible with New Deal progressiviesm; FDR  put the UYishuv first--implicitly: manged trade (the nation comes first; the nations is not the benficiatry ofthe creubs of glbaliztion that may trickedown





U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
cc
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
KE2019
The New Deal and Capitalism (notes)
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment




Modern Machinery & Continuous Process Multinationals

Post-modern Capitalism:

1. the Production of Subjectivities

2. the Financialization of Everything

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin 2024)



Attention Span II/ELITES

Networks of Power (Action Networks) Instead of "Class"
Elites: KE & New Deal (Maza*) "Third Force"
*  Maza describes the biocultural niche of modernity as networks of power-discourse
    central to what has become known as the French Revolution.


l
Part Four
the New Deal: the View from the Shoploor


Midland Steel: Layout with Work-Flow (drawn by Art Lamb, Works Manager)
m
In this interview Joe Bidinger describes the step-by-step movement of metal
from raw input to finished output.



j
3.  Joe Bidinger, Pete Olshove, and Chester Podgorsky in front of one of the large presses that produced
the siderails for the frame.  In this interview Joe Bidinger describes the step-by-step movement of metal
from raw input to finished output.

Michigan Steel Tube (UAW Local 238)
p







k
Roscoe vanZandt                      



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.



Toledo

Auto-Lite

Chevrolet
Ditzel, Roland
Willys-Overland
Addes
Spicer Mfg.

City Auto Stamping

Logan Gear Co

Bingham Stamping and Tool




South Bend

Bendix

Studebaker
Rightly



Milwaukee

Allis-Chalmers
Meyer, Stalin Over Wisconsin: the Making and unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950 (Rutgers, 1992)
Seaman Body
Speth



Cleveland

Fisher Body

White Motor
Mortimer




History without philosophy . . .






Midland Steel, UAW Local 410


1.  The AFL Faction: the Non-Production Craft and Service Sector
name
nationality
religion
year of birth
classificationdepartment






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 operatortransportation
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


Midland Steel, UAW Local 410

2.  The CIO Milieu: Bildungsproletarians  and Plebeian Upstarts
name
nationality
religion
year of birth
classificationdepartment






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

1912Proj. welderassembly
Peter Borovich
Serbian

1914arc welder
assembly






Peter Kotenko
Russian

1915
labor
transportation






THE SECOND GENERATION











John Kazmierski
Polish

1915
arc welderassembly
Ed Grabowski
Polish

1915
arc welderassembly
Ted Maciag
Polish

1915
arc welderassembly
Frank Kusz
Polish

1896
arc welderassembly
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