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A Response to Rebecca Hill

Messer-Kruse, Timothy
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4707

Publisher:  Against the Current
Date Written:  01/07/2016
Year Published:  2016  
Resource Type:  Article

Timothy Messer-Kruse responds to Rebecca Hill's review of his book The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The anarchists' history is far more complicated. As I detail in The Haymarket Conspiracy, Chicago's socialists underwent a rapid ideological evolution over the decade leading up to the Haymarket bombing. Many, like Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden and August Spies, began this period believing in socialism through the ballot box and union hall. They believed that socialism could be won peacefully and gradually, and supported a broad range of panaceas from the eight-hour day to worker cooperatives.

Meanwhile a new movement arose in central Europe, a revolutionary ideology that condemned such ideas as "soothing syrup for babies." Instead these militants argued that there was only path to true socialism: immediate armed insurrection.

Some of these extremists went so far as to argue that individual acts of terrorism were necessary to heighten class tensions, provoke the authorities, expose the hidden oppression of the state, and ultimately kindle the workers' revolt.
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