The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly

by Michael Mark Cohen

Overview

Between the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to destroy this anti-capitalist movement. The result was an escalating class conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy.

In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American social movements.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613766491
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	08/26/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

MICHAEL MARK COHEN is associate teaching professor in American studies and African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments: Co-Conspirators

Introduction: “The Conspiracy of Capital”: The Dialectics of Conspiracy in the Age of Monopoly

1. This Worn-Out Piece of Tyranny: Clarence Darrow, the Haymarket Generation, and the Secret History of Conspiracy Law

2. “Sensational Writing and a Fight”: Dangerous Knowledge, Socialist Detectives, and the Rise and Fall of the Appeal to Reason

3. “The Marks of Capital”: The Wobblies versus the Invisible Government

4. “The Ku Klux Government”: Law and Terror in the Red Scare

Conclusion: “Will Fascism Come to America?”: Civil Liberties, Antifascism, and the Legacy of the Haymarket Generation

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

Shelley Streeby

Cohen draws upon a strong archival base and an impressively wide range of texts to provide an illuminating analysis of how the politics of conspiracy was central to this era's culture of popular radicalism.

Editorial Reviews

“As the subtitle suggests, [Cohen's] ambitious, well-documented study explores the nexus between law, violence, and popular radicalism in an era when near-monopolistic conditions prevailed in the battle between labor and capital.”—CHOICE

“Examin[ing] the conspiracy rhetoric of the American Left as part of an interlocking system of political thinking that enmeshed both radicals and corporate conservatives . . . Cohen ably analyzes the contours and dynamics of a dialectic of conspiracy rhetoric that spun into powerful worldviews fueled by the periodic unmasking of actual conspiracies on both sides.”—The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“Cohen draws upon a strong archival base and an impressively wide range of texts to provide an illuminating analysis of how the politics of conspiracy was central to this era's culture of popular radicalism.”—Shelley Streeby, author of Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture

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From the Publisher