However, initially I made a slight mistake with the URL and went to the US Socialist Worker webpage. There I saw a link to "Haymarket Books" and promptly clicked on it. Haymarket Books, its webpage announced, "is a non-profit, progressive book distributor and publisher." They "take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their struggle for the eight hour day in 1886, which gave us May Day, the international workers' holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation."
Given this, I thought it would be interesting to see what books they had on anarchism. Yet when I searched the webpage for "anarchist" and "anarchism" there was not a single anarchist book, paper or tape returned. None were considered worthy of inclusion in the catalogue of a book distributor specifically named after martyred anarchists. Worse, the only things that came up were Marxist attacks on anarchism (and being the ISO, we can imagine how dishonest and inaccurate those are).
Indeed, the only positive reference to anarchism comes from a quote by August Spies, prefigured by the comment that he was "one of the Martyrs who was targeted for being an immigrant and an anarchist, who predicted the battles being fought to this day." Except, of course, all the Martyrs were targeted as being anarchists -- and active and effective labour unionists. The company does sell their autobiographies, although it cannot bring itself to mention their anarchism and describes them merely as "eight working-class fighters."
So a book publisher and distributor named after murdered anarchists feels it acceptable to only provide its customers with attacks on the ideas which their namesakes died for advocating and applying! Have they no shame?
The company boldly (and ironically) claims that "we believe that activists need to take ideas, history and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories as well as defeats can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world"! Unless, apparently, those ideas, history and politics happen to be anarchist. As the state of Illinois saw in 1886, some ideas are just too dangerous to be allowed to spread.
Not that anyone should be surprised by this. Leninists have a long and inglorious record of writing anarchists and anarchism out of the history books or distorting our ideas and history -- for understandable reasons. As Orwell noted in 1984, those who control the past control the future. Leninism can only be made appealing if genuine socialist alternatives to both it and capitalism are hidden from view.