on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint immediate post-war years

Saul Wellman, Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party

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.

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

Brain Plasticity and its Consequences

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)

Brain Plasticity and its Consequences

 . . . 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.

this is the best description of what I have been trying to formulate: the socio-cognitive cultural historical development of certain cognitive-performative elements that sharply distinguish the "semi-skilled" production and non-production workers from the peasant masses (Ong)

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

[Here Paul Silver makes my point.  The cogno-developmental ontological point, which I did not do a good job in this interview of making clear (In the Williams interview there is much along these lines regarding repair, set up, using micrometer in machine shop)]

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.