'The conspiracy of capital': American popular radicalism and the politics of conspiracy from Haymarket to the Red Scare

"'The Conspiracy of Capital': American Popular Radicalism and the Politics of Conspiracy from Haymarket to the Red Scare," is an historical interrogation of the political, legal and cultural struggle over the meaning of conspiracy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "The Conspiracy of Capital" argues that for the generation of American radicals who came of age after the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the generation who formed the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, who wrote for the Appeal to Reason, The Masses and The Messenger, and who marched in opposition to the political conspiracy trials of Big Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney and Sacco and Vanzetti, the politics of conspiracy was central to the ideological and strategic formation of what I refer to as a "culture of popular radicalism" in America. I frame this culture of popular radicalism as emerging in direct confrontation with the countersubversive tradition of criminalizing dissent, demonizing of "alien" ideologies like socialism, and the formation of private and public repressive apparatuses ranging from anti-union conspiracy laws to the wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts, and from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to the nation-building work of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. I argue that this reciprocal struggle between these combatants in the class or democratic struggle constitutes a "dialectics of conspiracy," in which conspiracy breeds conspiracy on the levels of law, political organization and through the field of ideological representation. My dissertation traces this dialectic of conspiracy from the evolution of conspiracy law and the repression of slave and labor uprisings in the nineteenth century, through the rise of popular socialism and Industrial Unionism in the era of monopoly capitalism, culminating in the wave of counter-revolutionary political repression and physical violence known as the Red Scare of 1919. My dissertation reframes the history of American conspiracy thinking beyond the limits imposed by the concept of "paranoia," to reconstruct the radical plebeian tradition of conspiracy thinking on the political left while reasserting the central importance of conspiracy in the ideology and political practices of both the rulers and the ruled.