Production	Production	non-Production
Assembler (Class A, B, C) Machine operator classifications Automatic Lathe Operator (Class A, B, C) Drill-Press Operator, Radial (Class A, B, C) Drill-Press Operator, Single- or Multiple-Spindle (Class A, B, C) Engine-Lathe Operator  (Class A, B, C) Grinding Machine Operator  (Class A, B, C) Machine-Tool operator, misc. machines Milling-Machine Operator  (Class A, B, C) Power-Shear Operator  (Class A, B, C) Punch-Press Operator  (Class A, B) Screw-Machine Operator, Automatic   (Class A, B, C) Turret-Lathe Operator, Hand (Class A, B, C) Swager	Forging Press Operator, Hydraulic (Vertical) Other metal-working occupations Welder, Hand (Class A, B) (Bill Mazey, Frank Fagan interviews); Almdale and Newby on welding Welder, Machine (Class A, B) Polisher and Buffer, Metal (metal finishing) Riveter, Hydraulic Riveter, Pneumatic Solderer (Edmund Kord) Non-metalworking occupations in the Auto industry Trim (Joe Adams and Art Grudzen on trim) paint (Paul Silver on paint testing)	Maintenance, Tool and Die, Shipping and Receiving Carpenter, Maintenance Crane Operator, Electric Bridge Die Setter Die Sinker Tool and Die Maker Trucker, Hand Trucker, Power Electrician, Maintenance Electrician, Production Millwright Set-Up Man, Machine Tools Loader and Unloader Stock Clerk Inspector  (Class A, B, C) Tester (Class A, B, C)

the "Russian" Revolution and the UAW

So far this page has moved, perhaps haphazardly, from the origins of language to the contemporary scene in the United States (Figure 0), while making clear at the outset that philosophy (Kant to Foucault, et al) is at the very center of this enterprise, and that one of the major problematics of this enterpise is the decline and perhaps catastrophic implosion of both individual cognitive development and cognitive performativity in real-life arenas (rallies, press conferences, "news" shows, interviews with rally attendees, etc.): biocultural niche distended/disintegrated Enter the bildungs-proletarians* of southeast Michigan circa 1935-44.  Figure 1, The UAW (Unity Caucus) will have many uses and emerge in many contexts on this site.  Look at History of Reading NOW.  Chapter 11 provides an indespensible context. 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.") The first thing that must be said is that these bildungs-proletararians were intensely rather that merely literate.  They were quintessentially modern.  (Red-diaper babies know what I'm talking about.  As I found out when I came to Detroit, the pink-diaper babies who grew up in the Socialist milieu  of Reuther, Mazey, Silver, Kord, Jenkins, Bully, and so on, were similarly quintessentially modern.)** It is our heritage--we red- and  pink-diapered ones who had been born into  this modernist milieu of bildungs-proletarians--that we are part of the extended mind of working-class modernity (Joe Adams Dodge Main sums it up).  Now it becomes clearer what I am up to.  These interviews are a set of dialogic unfoldings that form a lens through which to examine the ontologies and events, the transformations and reactions, that are subsumed under the term unionization.  The factories, meeting halls, and neighborhoods of southeastern Michigan are laboratories in which to investigate the play of forces: first, the deep structures, the genetic ontologies (the principles of the production of practices--Bourdieu) that dominate the manifold areas of human activity; and second, the irruption of forces of an entirely different kind (Bordieu), referred to variously as agency, bildung, and the will to power.  In addition, some of these interviews forced me to include the more nebulous concept of jouissance. 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.  Hence the juxtaposition of Figures 1 and 2. What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarian whom I interviewed. In the cell to the right I provide a few examples. 1.  Neil Leighton and the shock of recognition.  All of us historians who interviewed these “workers” back in the seventies and eighties were struck by their powers of mind, and also by what can only be described as their strength of character. 2.  Saul Wellman wasn't a historian.  He was a communist (post-war chairman of the Mich CP).  3.  Joe Adams sums up the mentalité of his peers 4.  Read these minutes and think of Donald Trump.  These workers were mostly plebeian upstarts, not bildungsproletarians.  Imagine what a Donald Trump in that context would sound like.  To get an idea of this, read Philip Rucker and Carol Leonning, A Very Stable Genius, pp. 129-139, on Trump's first big national security meeting in "The Tank" (when Tillerson called Trump a "fucking moron"). 5. Reading the Kraus interview . . . Once I had gotten things organized (Figure 1) I went back to see how Fig 1 would work as a synthetic a priori.  Bingo! (This needs explaining) * see Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity (New York University Press, 1994): excerpts **

NAME	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS
Neil Layton Historian	the shock of recognition one of the most interesting things for those of us working on this project is that after just a very short period of time in talking to a lot of rank-and-file people, you realize that, although they look like everybody else in Flint, they’re not, down deep they’re not. And their views on politics and religion may be the same as everybody else; they may be different. But there’s a certain level below which―and they’ve got these skills. Of course, the people coming out of the academic world, you know, particularly those out of a middle-class background, they cannot believe that anybody that hasn’t been to college can read.
Saul Wellman Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party	on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint immediate post-war years 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	Modernist Sensibilities on Detroit's East Side, circa 1930s 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.
Ed Lock (Ford, Communist) interview conducted around 1975-76	Modernist Sensibilities: Ed Lock on Schiller Hall 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.
	Plebeian Upstarts in Action 4. Minutes, Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives Detroit re. competitive situation in the spring and wire industry
	5. Reading the Kraus interview through the lens of figure 1
	5.  Packard Report 9-26-38
	Chrysler Emergency Meeting Schiller Hall 1939 Meeting of the Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees, November 7, 1939 — Schiller Hall
Lloyd Garrison to Felix Frankfurter	Garrison to Felix Frankfurter re. Allis Chalmers 4-29-41  7.  Christofel-Lilienthal (and Lindahl): Allis Chalmers (Milwaukee, UAW Local 248),
James Lindahl (Communist) Packard Local 190

UAW Factionalism

UAW Factionalism: 1936.  Black Legion exposed

UAW Factionalism: Spring 1938 Local Elections

Plymouth     Unity wins by two to one
West Side Local  four to one
Murray Body  Unity elected without opposition

Bohn Aluminum, Chevy Gear and Axle, Dodge Truck, Michigan Steel Castings, Hudson, and Locals 155 and 157 all elected solid Unity caucuses

Dodge Main: a majority of Unity candidates were elected
Chrysler Local 7 William Marshall, a Unity candidate, defeaetd the incumbent President R.J. Thomas.  Othere candidates on the Unity slate won all posts but two

Chevy Forge, all officers elected except the recording secretary were Unity candidates

Budd Wheel: elected a slaate of officers which is niether Progressive nor Unity, but the Martin group claims victory there
A Progressive slate was elected in the DeSoto local without much oppositon, and the small Motor Products local, long in control of reactionary elements, is claimed by the Martin group.

The Packard ocal defeated the Unity slte by a small margin only after the adherents of the Progressive caucus succeeded in committing the local to a vote by mail.

Patrimonialism and white supremacy

UAW Factionalism: the Toledo Conference August 1938

Charles Yaeger (Oral History: p. 12)

"Finally the CIO group, the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.

"We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was there that the union was born after all this factional problem.  Then, of course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much as the International was torn asunder the locals were, too.  We took over the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local 156], which became [local] 594.  We took it over with about 7,000 people working in the plant and 503 or 504 members.  This was all the membership we had.  We did not have the union."

UAW Factionalism, 1939: Two Strikes

GM T&D strike: July 5, 1939

Chrysler strike: Oct. 18 to Nov. 29, 1939

UAW Factionalism: 1939-41 NLRB Elections

NLRB election, Packard: Aug. 17, 1939

NLRB election, Motor Products: Aug. 22, 1939

NLRB election, Briggs: Sept. 14, 1939

NLRB election, Chrysler: Sept. 28, 1939

NLRB election, Midland Steel: Dec. 12, 1939

NLRB elections, all GM plants: April 17, 1940

NLRB election, Ford: May 21, 1941

NLRB election, Detroit Steel Products: June 20, 1941

Bildung and Ressentiment Civil War, 1936 to 1941: Midland Steel (readings) Schiller Hall: Bildung and Modernity (readings) Joe Adams on atheism of his peers (the Reuther group and beyond) North Dakota, Postel, Montgomery, Guttman Orality and Literacy  Ong, Olson, Luria, Heretz, Mironov Paul Silver (Detroit Steel Products) on print vs. oral cultures on the shopfloor ONG LURIA Saul Wellman (CP, Flint) on escape from the idiocy of orality Rosenfeld and Musso Bildungsproletarians and their other Herman Burt on Polish women Bill Jenkins on the Bulgarians Williams et. al. on hillbillies in Pontiac LIST n=37 Shelton Tappes and Herman Burt on Uncle Toms Frank Fagan on the "Americans" Plebeian upstarts Emergence of a UAW local Bud Simon's letter; robt travis letter Departmental biographies Frank Fagan on welding and welders Joe Adams and Art Grudzen on the Trim department Edmund Kord's synoptic view the Flying Squadrons: a workers' militia? Events Bud Simon on the firing of the two welders •John Anderson re 3 locals •John Anderson on CP in flux, critical period (this is part of Thermidor) Joe Adams on 1943 strike Earl Reynolds on first encounter Edmund Kord on stubb out cigarettes George Borovich and Chester Podgorsky on Sam Brear talking to ____________

RE. THE JOE ADAMS RATIO/10.6% Paul Silver--Edmund Kord--John Anderson--MIDLAND STEEL MST on relationship between Bildungsproletarian(s) and Plebeian Upstarts The Charlie Yaeger ratio (7.2%) Cliff Williams vs. Bert Harris rational-bur-bild vs. RMD

Groupings

Barney Kluck, Tool & Die the interviews: going down 1941 Non-production wage adjustments LIST Barney Kluck and Bob Brenner ( switched vote, susequent investigation by PF) on the Tool Room Ben Wainwright and the Elder Report (north Euro Prot, English swing  group of moderate but definitely modern citizens Cliff Williams and Frank Fagan (Racism in Pontiac; telling it like it is in Murray Body 1943 LIST Catholic (ACTU) part of coalition with racist forces in uaw "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (German: Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, also called On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense[1]) is a philosophical essay by Friedrich Nietzsche. It was written in 1873, one year after The Birth of Tragedy,[2] but was published by his sister Elisabeth in 1896 when Nietzsche was already mentally ill. The work deals largely with epistemological questions about the nature of truth and language, and how they relate to the formation of concepts." Herman Burt on Racism on the shopfloor (LUNCH)

CIVIL WAR IN MIDLAND STEEL: ETHNO-CULTURIAL AND SOCIO-TECHNICAL ANALYSIS

SHILLER HALL AS HABITUS/ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT Ed Lock: bildungsroman 1939 Chrysler Meeting

COMMUNISTS OBSERVE RACISM Herman Burt Shelton Tappes

BILDUNGS-PROLETRIANS ON THE "AMERICANS" Cosmopolitans vs. Provincvials Frank Fagan Bud Simons •Larry Jones-Clint van Zandt incident

Williams-Yaeger-Smith discuss 1937 Local 159 delegates to Milwaukee Convention LIST Bud Simons as ethnographer Frank Fagan as ethnographer The ethics of interpretation: The signifying chain from field to analysis, Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29(1) · March 2008, Claudia Lapping

the Elder Report ⊗ the Ben Wainwright interview re. Homer Martin and UAW Civil War

Racism, Patrimonialism Bert Harris: Press Room; BlackLegion (Cliff Williams on) A Prison Yard incident: Turk's gang vs. the black Muslims re. patrimonialism x-ref "tar-dipping incident" incident reported: "Unionists Linked to Tar-Party"DT 6-11-37 hearing reported: ["Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" DN 12-10-37] (blurred)

Norman Bully	Buick (Flint)	UAW Local 599
Arthur Case*	Buick (Flint)	UAW Local 599
Larry Jones	Chevrolet (Flint)	UAW Local 659
Bill Genski	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Bill Genski*	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Bud Simons*	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Bert Harris**	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Arthur Smith	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Cliff Williams +Yaeger	Yellow Cab (Pontiac)	UAW Local 594
Charlie Yaeger*
Bob Travis**	Flint	UAW Local 581
Henry Kraus**	Flint

 . . . distinctly human social cognitive capacities that include the bases of trust, co-operative and altruistic propensities, moral capacities, shared intentions and agency, sensitivity to local norms, and high-level abilities to model and track what others believe and what they know.