Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs

This volume collects the autobiographies of the eight Haymarket martyrs — August Spies, Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Samuel Fielden, and Oscar Neebe — the labor organizers framed in the wake of the Haymarket Affair of May 1886. These firsthand accounts document the writers' working-class origins, their development as militants in the struggle for the eight-hour day.

The Haymarket Affair stands as one of the most significant events in the history of the U.S. workers' movement, exposing the brutal lengths to which the capitalist class will go in their attempt to crush the struggle of the proletariat. Yet the testimonials of the martyred leaders themselves are too often ignored or buried beneath the liberal mythology around the events.

This edition includes a foreword by Prairie Fire Publishing situating the Haymarket martyrs within the broader development of the international workers' movement, and offering a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist assessment of the shortcomings of anarchism — the ideological current to which most of the martyrs adhered — while affirming the heroism and class partisanship that defined their lives and deaths.