The caesura in Marx's work was not the result of an epistemological revolution in 1845, but of his disappointment with the failure of the workers' revolution three years later.  The break was marked by repression of the knowledge that artisinal workers opposed to the spread of large industry had formulated the idea of workers' emancipation.  Marx (and Engels) came instead to place their hopes for a new revolutionary order in the factory proletariat to come, which would be molded by the discipline of large industry.  With this development, the proletariat left the real of social experience to become a normative category consecrated by a certain Marxist "science." (pp. xxi-xxii)

From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future "masters of the earth"; a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia -- a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon "man" himself.  Enough: the time is coming when politics will have a different meaning.

Memorandum FDR to FF, The White House, March 2, 1936

(b)  I wish you and Lasswell would try to work up a list of those smaller, independent business men -- say fifteen or twenty -- whom I could invite to Washington.  I know of no way of getting up such a list. . . . .

(d)  I hope to have a talk with Lincoln Filene.  I saw him the other day for a miinute but only with a group.  Please ask him if he can come down a little later on.

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

---

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.

This is the best description of what I have been trying to formulate: the  cognitive-performative elements that sharply distinguish the "Class A" "semi-skilled" production and non-production workers from the "Class C" "semi-skilled" production workers.

John [Anderson] was one of those who had an idea that his job should be a skilled trade
 . . . .
What you would also do is you would take . . . glaze a body, a putty-like lead coat . . . a lot of our guys have an imagination of what their jobs used to be.  When I describe my job, I can make is sound so fantastic and technically important when it wasn’t.  I use to test the paint, when we used the color varnish and when we were spraying, you had to mix your base paint with oleum, which was your thinner, and then they had to go through the ovens and dry, and based on the production needs you would thin down the paint so that the coat wouldn’t be too thick.  If they needed the bodies fast, so you had to put a thinner coat of paint on so that they would go through the oven and dry fast.  If you didn’t need the bodies you would thicken the paint down to specifications.  So I used to take the viscosity of the paint—sounds important as hell, the average workers don’t know what viscosity [is]; [it] sounds so technical. And hell all I used to do was keep a finger under the bottom of the viscosity pail (?) and fill it up and then take and put a level  on it to see that it was level and then remove the finger and with a stopwatch see how long it takes for the paint to flow out.  By that we would know how much of the paint would flow off the body when it was being poured on.  Then you would take the temperature of the ovens.  Sounds very important.  Hell, I was taught how to do that within an hour of the time I was hired.  Then they took three days 43:25  to show me how to make up the reports, to cheat, so that the Ford Motor Company, when it got its reports, the report would show that they had the right thickness of the paint that the specifications called for.  But the thickness of the paint was always based on how badly they needed the bodies.  If Ford needed the bodies they didn’t give a damn how much paint as long as you covered it.  So you see everybody made their job sound very important,  especially the leadership, the old militants like myself and John Anderson 44:00