p      l      o      j      u
              FDR signs Social Security Act 1935                                     Detroit News May 2, 1937                           UAW Packard edition: February 15, 1942                   Detroit News May 20, 1943                                                 USA     USA2    USA3 


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





This site is a rhizome.
This site is a rhizome.

Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.

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 0.1. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States.  Figure 0.1 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.

Taking into account the major perspectives on the development of language and cognition, and applying these results and methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativities of schooling, politics, and the media, we are led to a chilling conclusion:  we are now living through the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive performativities associated with the biocultural niche of modernity.  What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current popular and much scholarly thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its metaphysical presuppositions.

Context for understanding what is happening now is provided by Martyn Lyons.  A theoretical framework for understanding what is happening now is provided by Merlin Donald.






Bildung and Literacy: 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.")

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brain plasticity, biocultural niche, intersubjectivity

decades of intensive schooling (vs. Mortimer, Simon, Wellman)

Donald demolishes the intellectual foundations of racism

Donald's horizon is too restricted.  Formal education is not the only path to the "massive restructuring" involving the "complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking" developed over "decades of intensive schooling."  E.P. Thompson and Jacques Rancičre--the question of Bildung and the failure to address it by marxists, who did not follow up on E.P. and Jacques implicit focus on bildung, is part of this critique of marxism.


This is a major theme that ties the various parts of this site together.






from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2


 . . . 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.





organization and geography matter
The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources.  The organization of auto workers in southeastern Michigan was the culmination of the biocultural, developmental processes that Lyons (A History of Reading and Wrting) provides a framework for thinking about.  At issue is the question of agency--the emotional forces and the cognitive-discursive performativities of situated humans. 

Also at issue  is the question of fascism; the problemmatic of fascism; the riddle ofl fascism. 

And the question of anti-communism as the name I give to the black hole at the heart of the public sphere that not only distorts but determines the permissible boundaries and semiotic content of public discourse.

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. They were intensely rather that merely literate. In this regard they had more in common with the the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State 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.

It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern UAW in the 1930s.  From the standpoint of praxis both the Unity Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as vanguard formations within the biocultural field of Progressivism. 

All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind, but also by what can only be described as their strength of character.  They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.

Mind matters. (Hegel)





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



d1
       ↑                                              ↑
Dodge Main                             Midland Steel

See the evolving UAW-New Deal page here




the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
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

Nobuo Noda, How Japan Absorbed American Management Methods (Asian Productivity Organization, 1969)

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

See the evolving KE-NewDeal page here



Interrogating Dasein:
Bildungs-proletarians and Plebeian Upstarts



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this theme of cog-disc perf continues in the looking at the "New Deal".

Plane of Immanence (Deleuze)








Figure 1a. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943
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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)


Reformation Roots

from Richard White, The Republic for which it Stands: the United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017), p. 776
Pullman's workers had not been plucked from the slums; they were unlikely to come from neighborhoods around Hull House on Halstead Street.  His factory in the 1880s employed about 75 percent skilled workers . . . and most were northern European immigrants: Swedes, Germans, English and Dutch.

Networks of Power
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Why Dasein?
Reformation "Roots"
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Jóhann Páll Árnsason and Björn Wittrock, eds., Nordic Paths to Modernity (Bergham Books, 2012)
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.
 Bruce Laurie, Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (U. of Mass. Press, 2015)
Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge, 2005)
 John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: an Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, 2013)
Kenyon Gradert, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (Chicago, 2020)
 John L. Brooke, "There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019)
Zachary A. Fry, A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Republic (U. of N. Carolina Press, 2020)
James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (Hill and Wang, 1997)