Messer-Kruse's Haymarket History

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4655
Date Written:  2016-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21391

Book reviews of Timothy Messer-Kruse's two works The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

On the question of anarchist support for the labor movement, Messer-Kruse makes the case that the Chicago group were closer to Bakunin than Marx, and that they were not genuine labor movement advocates.

In The Haymarket Conspiracy, Messer-Kruse describes Marx's revolutionary theory as a kind of elitest gradualism involving the tutoring by socialists of the "benighted masses." For Bakunin, by contrast, he argues, revolution was not a future "abstraction" but an immediate goal.

Thus, if the anarchists made an argument for the use of force rather than advocating a gradual and "intellectual" process, they were neither Marxists, nor genuine members of the labor movement. Instead, he reaches the damning conclusion that they were using the Chicago labor movement as a "Trojan Horse" to carry out Bakuninist ideology.