Loren Kruger’s “Literary? Public? Proletarian: Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article uses Negt and Kluge’s conception of proletarian Öffentlichkeit or public spheres and practices as a point of departure for analysis the writing and speeches of the social activists who were tried and executed for anarchism and other crimes against law and order after the Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886. This analysis includes contextual commentary on the Great Chicago Fire, the contribution of Germans and other immigrants to socialist agitation in the United States and thus to the practice of tactical cosmopolitan and transnational culture, and the legacy of the Haymarket for current critics of capitalism from the Industrial Workers of the World to the Occupy Movement.
