Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power. Michael Tigar
MYTHOLOGIES OF STATE AND MONOPOLY POWER
Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power
MICHAEL E. TIGAR
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2018 by Michael E. Tigar
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher.
Names: Tigar, Michael E., 1941– author.
Title: Mythologies of state and monopoly power / Michael E. Tigar.
Description: New York : Monthly Review Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038348 (print) | LCCN 2018039071 (ebook) | ISBN 9781583677445 (trade) | ISBN 9781583677452 (institutional) | ISBN 9781583677421 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781583677438 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Law—United States. | Justice, Administration of—United States. | Human rights—United States.
Classification: LCC KF384 (ebook) | LCC KF384 .T54 2018 (print) | DDC 340/.1140973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038348
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MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
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Contents
Introduction: Mythologies, Mental Shortcuts, Rationalizations, Impressions
~ Fear, Loathing, and Myth I: The Japanese Internment and Manipulated Fear
~ Fear, Loathing, and Myth II: “Separate but Equal” and the Land Where Supreme Court Justices Dwell
~ The Last Gasp of “Separate but Equal”
~ The Persistence of Racist Mythologies
2. Mythologies of Criminal Justice
~ Mass Incarceration and Social Control
~ Plea Bargains: The Mythology of Consent
~ Point: Orlando Hall, the “Other,” and Ineffective Counsel
Objectively Ineffective
~ Counterpoint: Clarence Darrow Confronts Racist Mythology
~ Albert Camus’s The Stranger: Mythologies of Trial and Colonial Mentality
~ Battling for Defendant Rights
3. Mythologies of Free Expression
~ State Repression
~ Who Owns the Streets?
~ But for Colporteurs, Maybe Anything Goes
~ Abolishing “Feudalism”: A Mythology of Freedom
~ The Evanescence of Custom
~ SLAPP-Happy: Fries with That
~ A Lawsuit Lovely as a Tree
~ Radio Days: The Property Norm Devours the Mythology of Free Expression
~ As Seen on TV
~ The Pentagon Papers: Privatizing John Adams’s “General Knowledge”
4. Mythologies of Worker Rights
~ Contract, Conspiracy, and Worker Consent
~ The Nineteenth-Century Worker in the Courts
~Shakespeare on Worker Consent
~ Smithfield Redux: Community Organizing and Employer Consent
~ Sickening Opposition to Workers’ Rights
5. Mythologies of International Human Rights
~ The Kiobel Case: “United States Law … Does Not Rule the World”
~ O Tortured Workers, Won’t You Make Me a Mercedes-Benz
INTRODUCTION
Mythologies, Mental Shortcuts, Impressions
THIS BOOK IS A COLLECTION of essays. Some of them focus on how mythologies mask state repression of democratic rights in the fields of racism, criminal justice, free expression, worker rights, and international human rights. Others deal with the ways that ordinary private law categories of property, contract, and tort perform the same social function.
Mythologies are structures of words and images that portray people, institutions, and events in ways that mask an underlying reality. In the days when France used the guillotine, the executioner cried, just after the blade dropped, “Au nom du peuple français, justice est faite.” In the name of the French people, justice is done. This cry had no rational relation to discourse about what is fair, right, decent, or in accord with evidence about conduct. “Justice” was a name given to an event, to elevate the act of killing into an acceptable and rational process.
To proclaim “Justice” committed two solecisms. First, it appropriated justice as the exclusive property of the state. Second, it assigned a fictitious value to the word, invoking a mythology of the universality of language.
In the United States, there is a department that calls itself Justice. Colloquially, we use the term “criminal justice system,” as though we are invited to ignore a system of endemic unfairness that has produced mass incarceration.
In 1957, the French writer Roland Barthes published a series of essays, under