Hegel, Philosophy of Right, preface

          

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries.  I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, preface

The Two-Party System (Semiotic Regimes): Elites and their Masses

The Two-Party System (Semiotic Regimes ):
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations

So what is the nature of the present crisis?  Confining myself to the United States and by extension to other parts of the late-capitalist world . . . I want to suggest the following elements.

First, beginning in good Marxist fashion from the current transformations of economic life, I would foreground the still unfolding consequences of fundamental capitalist restructuring.  That would include deindustrialization; the dismantling of Western capitalism's historic manufacturing base; post-Fordist transitions; the transnationalization of labor markets and the re-proletarianizing of labor; a new regime of accumulation ordered around the mobility of capital and the spectacle of consumption; a regime of regulation ruthlessly validating private accumulation and the gutting of public goods; and the hypertrophied dissorder of a deregulated financial center whose dominance is severed (or freed) from any apparent mechanism of accountability or relationship to productive investment [see FF to FDR].  This first element--the fiscal crisis of late capitalism -- has profound implications for the conduct of government, for the reliable stabilities of political order, for the organized distribution of state power, and for the practice sovereignty.

Second, the entailment of late capitalist restructuring is a drastic and thoroughgoing process of class recomposition.  Class formation in the United States is always highly regionalized, always porous to cross-border migrancy on a vast scale, always structure around race, always subject to extraordinarily effective mystification, always construed into being something else [CDP].  Yet, by any objective criteria, the working class of today — as a social category of wage-earners dependent for a livelihood on the sale or exchange of labor power — is larger, less secure, and less reliant on the collective solidarities of residence, workplace, associations, and organized political agency than ever before.  Of course, even in the 1950s and 1960s the social citizenship of some workers ( mainly skilled, male, white) — their job security, higher wages and greaer benefits, access to healthcare and housing, expectation of pensions, limited recognition under the law — always. presupposed a much wider reservoir of cheap and disposable labor power (mobil, low-waged, insecure, unprotected), whether located inside the sovereign borders or iin the neocolonial elsewhere.  In these terms, the postwar experience of relatively humanized capitalism remained no less beholden to globalized systems of exploitation of natural resources, human material, and grotesquely unequal terms of trade than the preceding era of imperialist expansion.  Postwar gains were embedded in the privileged prosperity of a metropolitan boom whose very possibility rested on historically specific repertoires of extraction and exploittion eperating on a world scale.  But now even that relative working-class prosperity stands reveal as a finite and passing phenomenon. At an ever-accelerating pace, the social relations of work have been t ransformed since the 1980s into the new low-waged, semi-legal, and deregulated labor market of a maiinly service-based and transnationalized economy.  This as-yet unstoppable story of the de-skilling, de-unionizing, de-benefiting, and de-nationalizing of labor via the rampant processes of metropolitan deindustrialization and global capitalist restructuing has comprehensively undermined the model of significant social improvement around which so much of postwar poltical culture became built.

Not the least of the changes under way since the 1970s is thus a re-proletarianization of labor.  From our vantage point now [2013 pub. date] the relative working-class prosperity of the postwar boom re-emerges as a highly contingent interlude in the life of a capitalist social formation whose ordering principles look very different over the fullest span of its history.  From the mid 1970s, every element in the potentially democratizing architecture of a postwar political imaginary was brought under brutally effective political attack.[Stayin’ Alive; Williams/Pontiac]  By the 1990s, little remained of either the practices or the principles, let alone the material structures and institutional relations previously organizing the political common sense.  The Social contract associated with the New Deal and the Great Society was gone. (pp. 215-216) . . . .  This new dialectic of international conflict and societal crisis may well enable a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.

This is part of a larger sample that was the basis for discussions between PF and RB that led to a series of reconceptualizations, methodological as well as substantive, and is provided so that the reader can have some idea of what we were working with.  The failure of much of local journalism to provide basic facts re. employment (occupation and industry) led me to cut short my efforts to do all 212 individuals that I was working with.  As it turned out, this was sufficient material to think about, analyze, and draw conclusions from.

Regional breakdowns.  This was the second step in arriving at the tables of arrestees from selected states that became the basis for the comments on this page.  Geography matters!



New England
Southeast (north)
Southeast (south)
Mideast
Great Lakes
Plains
Southwest
Rocky Mountain
Far West

As we reviewed these materials, it  became increasingly evident that the analysis out of the University of Chicago (and mainstream media coverage in general) failed to comprehend the major features of the dataset Arrests Arising out of the Assault on Congress. 


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.

---

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)

the murray body spring committee meeting, April 26, 1939

The members of the Local 2 Committee were:

Brother Hall from Spring & Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini, Vice President
Also present: Executive Board member Walter Reuther

The Meeting in the Tank, July 20, 2017

Think of it this way. Workers at McDonald’s outlets all over the world tend to be at the lower end of the labor force, say the 20th percentile. But Danish workers at the 20th percentile are high school graduates who are literate and numerate.

In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity.

 . . . 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.

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.

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.

For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature.  The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

. . . learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn. (p. 17)

In general, cognition and emotion are regarded as two interrelated aspects of human functioning.   (p. 36)

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)

Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. . . .  We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations.  Since 1950 we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot.  pp. 10-11

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples.  This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable.  p. 29

To understand the cognitive implications of literacy it is also necessary to see writing not only as a tool for solving problems but rather as a generalized means or medium for repesentation and communication that give rise to those unique forms of human competence we in modern society define as intelligence and rationality.

Nevertheless, the terminology 'concrete operations', 'formal operations', is still apparently found to be useful by those reporting on empirical research, and by many who write about child development and curriculum reform.  p.68

Tamburrini (1982) pointed out that “there is considerable evidence that formal operational thought is contextually bound” (p. 319).  This is no small concession; the very point of formal operations is that they go beyond context and content.  The failure of adolescents and adults to reason in the ways predicted by Piaget is a serious problem for both the theory and practice of education, for it is precisely the formal reasoning skills that are necessary for mastering academic subjects such as math and science beyond the elementary level.  p. 130

Biologically primary abilities are acquired universally and children typically have high motivation to perform the tasks involving them.  In contrast, biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often tedious repetition and external motivation are necessary for their mastery.  From this perspective it is understandable that many children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics (p. 63).  p. 131

Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams.

My situation was hardly unique — rampant A.I. cheating has been reported all over the country. But I felt a dread I struggled to express until a colleague articulated the problem in stark terms: “Our students are about to turn subcognitive,” she said. That was it. At stake are not just specialized academic skills or refined habits of mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency. To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I. companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary powers of thought.

Yet I have come to see that something far more fundamental is being put at risk. Developing our linguistic capacities — to master diverse concepts, to follow an intricate argument, to form judgments, to communicate those to others — is the development of our capacity to think.

For us human beings, using language is not a skill like any other — it is the way we do almost anything at all. Philosophers have disputed whether beings could exist that could think despite lacking language, but it is clear that humans cannot do so.

We grasp the very contours of our world in and through language. But we are not born with a language. We have to acquire and develop our linguistic capacities through immersive practice with other human beings. For hundreds of years, in advanced societies this has meant cultivating an intimate familiarity with human writing.

A depleted conceptual reservoir would render our lives crude and our experience of the world undifferentiated and coarse. Worst of all, cognitive degradation threatens our claim to self-rule: It is far from obvious that the denizens of the subcognitive society would be fit to participate in the democratic processes that determine how we structure our societies and lives.

Higher education aims to create cognitively mature adults, which in turn requires us to ensure students learn to read, think and write all on their own. It is easier than we think: Creating tech-free spaces and incentivizing students to spend time in them requires no new resources. All it takes is will. Many of our students still have it. Do their teachers?

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

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.