Would the miners think we were crazy?
When we flew to Alabama to support striking coal miners at the Warrior Met Coal Company, I was unsure what to expect. In addition to virtually ignoring the strike, national media had spent years depicting "red-state America" as a hopeless bastion of reactionary bigotry. Would the miners welcome support from communist New Yorkers? Would they think we were crazy? Would they be angry?
The response was extraordinary—we were welcomed, and so was our message. (There were exceptions, but they merely proved the rule.) The miners, feeling isolated by the national media's conspiracy of silence, were gratified to have support from outsiders.
They spoke to us about the life-threatening hazards miners face daily, and management's total disregard for their well-being. One 24-year-old worker had lost feeling in two of his fingers due to job-related injuries. Once, when he'd come to his manager with a hurt hand, the manager had checked the inside of his glove for blood to make sure he was being truthful.
Facing death on the job has given these miners a tremendous bond. This is what made them receptive to our message—that the world should be run by, and for, workers. The power of solidarity has kept them alive on a daily basis, and empowered them to demand more from their bosses. (And the miners hadn't bought into the Trump narrative of immigrants stealing good jobs from Americans. They expressed sympathy for exploited immigrant workers.) Everywhere we went, we could see that revolutionary class consciousness was almost there.
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Hammer, Hoe, and Hum: Alabama’s workers still fighting capitalism
The recent CHALLENGE article discussing our Party’s work with miners in Alabama reminded me of how much workers in Alabama have had to and continue to endure in recent history. It often seems that in Alabama, workers have had to deal with the consequences of U.S. capitalism in more brutal ways than workers in other states.
Alabama has been in the news recently due to a failed bid to organize Amazon workers. And other news articles recently noted that more people in Alabama died than were born in 2020 due to the bosses’ lack of a response to the Covid-19 crisis. This is more bad news for a state that already deals with some of the highest poverty rates and lowest education rates in the country.
The articles about our comrades’ visit to show support to workers in Alabama coincided with our club’s reading of early chapters from Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley.
All of the recent Alabama news reminds me of a few key lessons:
HThe bosses focus on separating workers by race and class is rooted in their goal to eliminate the idea of workers coming together to do anything empowering. That’s why Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always and will continue to prioritize worker solidarity!
Beware of the Black bourgeoisie’s attempts to encourage Black workers not to unionize or stand together against the system. A Black capitalist is still a capitalist! In Hammer and Hoe, Kelley describes the way wealthier Black people and the NAACP sought to dampen union struggles in the early 1920’s and 30’s and instead, promoted supporting Black business as the solution to the workers’ problems. Sound familiar?
HThe U.S. has focused so intently on reducing the power of unions in an effort to reduce the power of workers and combat communism.
HThe working class’ experience dealing with capitalist abuse has the potential to create new leadership within the working class. Kelley references workers who became Alabama Communist Party  leaders like Angelo Herndon, Estelle Milner and Al Murphy - all who joined the Party due to their own experiences dealing with the racist system in the South and throughout the U.S.
While bad news about the situation for workers in Alabama abounds, communists have and will continue to be there to support workers as shown through the history discussed in Hammer and Hoe and in the Party’s more recent work supporting miners in Brookfield.
There are many more lessons to learn beyond the four described above, but the final point is the most important: it is up to us, Progressive Labor Party, to help make clear the abuses of capitalism and to show our base that we have been and will always be there to help workers create a better world for the international working class.
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