Alabama coal miner strike: solidarity, struggle, revolution

BROOKWOOD, AL—City University of New York (CUNY) students and faculty in the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) concluded a solidarity week in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, supporting 1,100 Black and white striking miners at the Warrior Met Coal Company. The miners have been striking since April 1 over outrageous safety violations, deep wage cuts, and slashed benefits, amid record coal profits. They have made history as Alabama’s longest strike.
Thousands of other miners, nearby Amazon workers, and railroad workers at CSX (see sidebar) are watching this strike. Warrior Met miners can potentially spread working-class rebellion throughout the South. PLP stands with these miners who have exposed “democracy” as a capitalist dictatorship. We are learning from the militant fightback and leadership of our new friends, as we build a mass Party for communism, where workers like the Alabama miners run the world.
Despite the lies told about communism, many miners already have an idea of communism through solidarity. In Alabama, Black and white miners and their families are experiencing a glimpse of communism, as antiracist solidarity characterizes their strike. Communism means smashing racism, sexism, imperialism, money, and nationalism. The working class can and will run society, without Warrior Met, Wall Street, or any capitalists.
Antiracist solidarity sets the tone
In Alabama, we drove into the mountains to a mine portal (entrance) that we found on a map. Miners maintain 24/7 camps at each mine portal. We were met with two contradictory responses. First came anticommunism: one miner told us, before we even spoke, to take our “agenda” and leave. We ignored the hostility and introduced ourselves to every miner. The second response set the tone for the week: solidarity. Most miners welcomed us, offering food and shade. They invited us to their picket line for anti-scab duties during shift change.  
This initial anticommunism came partially from the poisonous role played by revisionists (fake leftist groups). They had descended on the strike like parasites, shouting empty political slogans, giving wooden speeches, and acting like bosses. We were thanked for first showing up to stand alongside fellow workers and listening, learning, and helping with whatever work the strike required.
As we made friends and talked about workers' power and revolution, we picketed and volunteered with the union’s Women’s Auxiliary. These strong women workers kept the miners and families fed and supplied. Soon, we were “part of the family” and given important tasks like ferrying supplies to picket lines and union halls in the mountains.
The bosses’ government and revolution
The U.S. capitalist state (government) power in Tuscaloosa County is palpable.
The entire state apparatus is in the bosses’ pockets, from the county judge to the governor; from the police to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington; Republican Party to Democratic Party.
Court injunctions issued by the local judge forbid miners from blocking the scabs. The judge said the word scab was “offensive” and may constitute hate speech. In Alabama, a state with virtually no gun regulations, strikers are forbidden to carry firearms on the picket line.
Meanwhile, scabs and owners have openly shot at miners and run over several with their cars while police looked the other way. The state troopers told us they could do nothing if we got shot.
The miners are facing down the entire capitalist state. Warrior Met and its top Wall Street investor, BlackRock, want to crush the largest unionized mine in Alabama. PLP fights to organize workers to break the bosses’ laws that only serve the capitalists. We invite the miners to join PLP and organize to overthrow this entire capitalist state with communist revolution and build our own workers’ state.
Black workers: key to communist revolution
The bonds of comradeship between Black and white miners painted a vibrant picture of multiracial unity. Unlike the fake liberal woke garbage of identity politics, these miners show why multiracial unity is so deadly to capitalism and vital for the working class.
The bosses’ electoral circus offers nothing for workers. The Democratic Party promotes liberal fascist identity politics. They have abandoned white workers to gutter racist Donald Trump, who just had a mass rally in Alabama and never mentioned the strike.
Black miners hail from the most brutally attacked section of the working class. As one Black miner and new CHALLENGE reader confided, Black miners know enemies from friends, and our communist politics are a threat to the bosses.
 They share their sharp analysis of the bosses’ state with their white sisters and brothers. They are clear on how racism divides and hurts all workers.
Power of industrial workers
The bosses divide us to maintain their racist profit system. Warrior Met miners know better than anyone how much profits the bosses make. Coal miners, like all workers in basic industries, are closest to the heart of capitalist production. They’re also closest to shutting down the entire capitalist system. Capitalists worldwide rely on Alabama miners’ quality, high-sulfur coal for everything from construction to weapons, and rail workers at CSX transport $2 million per day of coal to the Port of Mobile. Under the leadership of industrial workers like the Warrior Met coal miners, a mass, fighting PLP can transform the coming imperialist war into a class war for workers’ power.
Meanwhile, through our unions, student groups, and mass organizations, we are gearing up to send relief to the miners. From the early days of our Party with the Hazard Miners’ Solidarity Campaign of 1962 (see CHALLENGE, 5/7/15) to today, solidarity runs deep in our Party’s history. With two dozen contacts and eight CHALLENGE subscriptions, multiracial class solidarity like this will bring a communist world even closer.

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Rail workers in antiracist solidarity with miners

The striking miners at Warrior Met Coal have much to teach the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the international working class about multiracial unity. During one political conversation, a white coal miner explained: “If I’m racist toward [a Black coworker] it gets you killed. You can’t bring any of that down there because we all depend on each other to survive.”
A Black miner agreed, “It means we all die. Besides after 12  hours, we’re all covered in coal dust and you can’t really tell anyway.”
This multiracial solidarity is having an impact on rail workers at CSX, one of the largest freight railroads east of the Mississippi River. We learned from the miners that the rail workers at CSX are angry at being overworked and are pissed off that CSX is carrying scab coal.
As soon as we learned this, PL’ers moved into action. We drafted and printed a leaflet while researching CSX rail yards. After first failing, we finally found a railroad yard. While distributing 100 leaflets, we met enthusiastic rail workers who told us “all of us are pissed! But our union is in bed with CSX and the mine owners.
 We talk about it every day but there’s no leadership.” Just like that, we gained a friendship and a CHALLENGE subscription.
PLP applauds the CSX train engineers for refusing to drive trains into mine portals, and forcing their supervisors to do it. PLP also supports the mass movement among CSX workers pushing their union misleadership to stop ALL train shipments of scab coal anywhere in the railroad system. While the miners have been bleeding Warrior Met of superprofits, one of the ways that Warrior Met is trying to starve the miners out is through moving scab coal by CSX-owned railroads to the Port of Mobile, Alabama.
Like with Warrior Met, BlackRock is a major CSX shareholder. Like the overworked miners, the bosses are overworking CSX rail workers. In recent years CSX has been exhausting rail workers with schedule changes so bad they risk workers’ safety and have cut their time off.
The U.S. bosses have always used the Southern states as a low-wage, non-union haven where the widest pay gaps between Black and white workers sharpen racism and drag down wages everywhere. Armed with communist politics, miners and rail workers united in working-class solidarity can engulf the entire South in rebellion and workers’ power!