One hundred years ago, August to September 1921, the world witnessed the largest armed rebellion of workers in U.S. history since the Civil War: the Battle of Blair Mountain. It was a great example of multiracial unity between Black and white miners.
Ten thousand armed coal miners marched from Charleston, West Virginia, 70 miles south to Blair Mountain, Logan County, West Virginia, to destroy the unjust system that had taken their health, their homes, and many of their lives. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the new workers’ state, the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers. While the immigrant workers were originally sent to break the strike. The multiracial miners foiled the bosses plans by organizing these workers and turning the strike into a worker’s army.
The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed bombers armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army. The workers faced the U.S. army, 3,000 local deputies, police, gunmen and the State Militia.
This march was the miners' immediate reaction to the August 21, 1921, murder of two of their own by the coal bosses' hired gunmen on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. These killings had followed years of unionizing attempts and guerrilla warfare in the West Virginia coal fields the previous winter.
Within 72 hours, 7,000 armed miners assembled outside Charleston and told the State government that they were going to “open up” Logan County for unionization and “blow it away.” On August 24, the miners' multiracial army, white and Black, citizen and immigrant, began the 70-mile march to Logan.
As the miners made their way from town to town, their ranks swelled.” By the time they reached Blair Mountain, they were 10,000 strong. The miners were a “fully-trained, highly disciplined army ... All the officers were World War I veterans  ...
They taught the miners troop movements [and] flank formations. They formed squadrons.
The original...rednecks’
The white workers, indicating their pro-working class politics over the bosses’ racism, wore red bandanas around their necks, earning the insult “redneck” by the capitalist media (Appalachian Magazine, 5/23/16).
In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history and erase multiracial unity , it was after Blair Mountain that the “redneck” term became, in dictionaries and media, obscured and synonymous with “cracker” (originally, a child of a convict) and “hillbilly” (originally, extremely poor, often interracial, whites living in the Appalachian mountains and outside the norms of southern society).
This multiracial workers' army were the original “rednecks.” Perhaps in the future we should refer to racists in the South the same way we describe them anywhere in the world, simply as “racists.”
Matewan
The events that led up to the outbreak of this strike and the battle are depicted in the 1987 film “Matewan.” The film shows the miners fighting the bosses’ goons from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency and killing some of them.
But the main strength of the film is its realistic depiction of the militant multi-racial unity of the miners.
The key political struggle Kenehan [union organizer]wages in the first part of the movie is the one against racism. He attacks the racism of some of the miners and calls for organizing the Black and Italian workers into the union. ‘Few Clothes’ John, leader of the Black miners, also has an anti-racist position. There is a great showdown at the mine entrance, under the guns of the company thugs, as the miners stand all together, Blacks, white, and Italian. They march and sign ‘Avanti Popolo’(CHALLENGE, 10/21/87).
The miners lose in the end, as they did in real life. They have no communist party to build for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses. In the film as in reality the bosses, the goons, and the courts defeat the miners in the end.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to be the heir of this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.J
The quotes in this article are drawn from a video production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, entitled Even the Heavens Weep—The West Virginia Mine Wars.

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.
*****
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.
*****

 52 years ago this fall, students at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York seized the administration building and demanded throwing the U.S. military’s ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) off campus. This student occupation was led by the Worker-Student Alliance faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was a part of the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle involving many millions against U.S. imperialism.
Knowing that reform orgnizations like SDS will never truly liberate the working class, the key force behind this worker-student alliance, was the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP). We continue to organize and fight back against racism to this day. The lessons learned by the inspiring fightback at Fordham are a manual for students and workers everywhere organizing to take student-worker unity all the way to communist revolution!`
Fordham SDS: baptism through struggle
Fordham is a Catholic school and had traditionally been a conservative place, with an openly fascist student group in the 1930s supporting fascists during the Spanish Civil War. By the mid-60s, it became more liberal, with Fordham students picketing the nearby Woolworths department store for supporting racial segregation in the U.S. south.
Fordham SDS was started in 1965/66 and was militant from the start. By 1968, the Fordham chapter had become influenced by the PLP-led Worker Student Alliance faction of SDS. Increasingly larger and more forceful demonstrations during the next two years opposed Navy recruiters and Dow Chemical, makers of the horrible weapon napalm (jellied gasoline) which was used by the U.S. military against the Vietnamese. The action against Dow Chemical involved hundreds of students shoving campus guards and recruiters with their table, chairs and literature down the hall and down flights of stairs. We also demonstrated against Marine recruiters. For years, we held many forums, workshops and had many late-night conversations in the dorms. 

Students ignite rebellion within U.S. imperialism
ROTC, which trains college students to become junior officers in the military, is an integral part of the U.S. military's war machine. The sight of cadets marching around the college grounds was juxtaposed to the horrors being imposed on the Vietnamese workers we saw on TV every night. Among the thousands of students at Fordham, anger and anti-imperialist solidarity with the Vietnamese workers combined with militant political leadership finally boiled over.
On November 12, 1969, hundreds of students smashed into the administration building and kicked out the president and his flunkies. Barricades were built against the doors with file cabinets as student government representatives tried to negotiate our surrender of the building. Then the administration launched the beefed-up Campus Guards against our barricades. For several hours we fought them off. Late in the evening, we learned that the administration had called in the NYPD. We decided to fight our way out and the best exit seemed to be a window onto the porch. More than 60 of us burst out into a wild melee of at least 20 fist fights going on with the guards outside. Meanwhile, hundreds of students streamed out of the dorms to support and protect us. Several students were grabbed and handed over to the NYPD when they arrived. One was freed by the demonstrators. We then marched up the avenue about a half a mile to the police precinct where the students were being held, demanding their release. We were met by a large contingent of a heavily armed Tactical Patrol Force and were forced to retreat.
Mass base defends students, exposes bosses
26 students were eventually charged, and all but five took a plea deal. Those who didn’t included two members of PLP, and another Worker Student Alliance student. Over the next several months we organized against the bosses’ legal system, turning the case around, and exposing the role of the bosses’ judicial system within the capitalist state. Finally, because of mass support, the students involved were given a slap on the wrist.
The following spring, we continued the fight against ROTC and continued building a strong campus Worker Student Alliance movement. We especially organized support for the cafeteria workers and helped them fight to prevent their being screwed by a new sub-contractor.
Build a base in the working class
Over the past 20 years, we have had several reunions from those days. The largest was two years ago, on the 50th anniversary, when almost 40 participants and friends reunited near Fordham. Some of these attendees became lifelong communists.
The fightback at Fordham shows the power of communist ideas when grasped by masses of students and workers. Against a worldwide backdrop of millions of workers, hundreds at Fordham demonstrated their willingness to fight back against imperialism and support the occupation. Despite the bosses using their state power and police to end it, this mass base followed the students’ militant leadership and defended them in the aftermath, and many remain committed to antiracist, anti-imperialist struggle decades later.
The documentary Fordham SDS was made from film footage taken during the November 12 takeover by a brave comrade who was also a filmmaker, while another brave comrade smuggled the footage out of the building. This documentary is a class in student-worker organizing. As the bosses of the U.S., China and Russia look to today’s youth as cannon fodder for World War III, PLP continues building student-worker unity to smash this entire imperialist system with communist revolution once and for all.

 

The deadly August 26 suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport was yet another gut punch to the stature of the United States, an imperialist world power in steep decline. After the ISIS-K small-time terrorists claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed close to 200 workers and 13 U.S. military personnel, the leader of the world’s largest terrorist gang countered with a drone strike that slaughtered at least 10 civilians, including seven children (New York Times, 9/5). “We will hunt you down and make you pay” (Reuters, 8/27), said U.S. President Joe Biden. But Biden’s bluster fooled no one. The chaotic military withdrawal exposed the weakness of the U.S. ruling class as they move toward fascism and broader war in a more and more volatile world.
Because make no mistake: The end of the latest imperialist disaster in Afghanistan is no move toward peace. In fact, it opens the door for the U.S. bosses to accelerate their fascist build-up to a conflict with China and possibly Russia, their main capitalist rivals. But the U.S. rulers’ disunity, incompetence, and general disarray are only intensifying as they prepare for the inevitable collision.
In a period when the international working class is faced with the worst that capitalism has to offer—a deepening climate crisis, an unchecked pandemic, racist and sexist terror, and mass unemployment—the absolute necessity for workers to fight back is clear. Our only path forward is to build the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as our weapon to destroy capitalism and the mass-murdering bosses once and for all.
U.S. bosses struggle to chart a course toward war
At a time when Biden—and the finance capital Big Fascist (see glossary, page 6) bosses he represents—desperately need internal unity to chart a new path, their system lies in turmoil. Killer floods and wildfires, a new wave of Covid-19 deaths, and mounting unemployment are the glaring realities of pandemic-era capitalism.
Biden faces his own crisis of legitimacy. He rebuked his top military brass after they opposed the abrupt pullout. Now his generals are predicting that Afghanistan could soon collapse into civil war (Al Jazeera, 9/5). Biden’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure bill, a necessity for the U.S. bosses to compete with their Chinese adversaries, could wind up torpedoed—not just by the isolationist Small Fascists who have hijacked the Republican Party, but also by some of Biden’s assumed allies in Congress (ABC News, 9/5).
The Big Fascists’ long-term plan to use higher tax rates to raise money for war and discipline their own class, a hallmark of fascism, is meeting fierce resistance from companies like the multi-trillion-dollar Apple and finance capital mainstay Exxon Mobil (Business Insider, 9/3).
Most concerning for the U.S. rulers is their inability to win allegiance from a war-weary population to fight the bigger wars to come. Working-class youth—many of them jobless and in crushing debt, and infuriated by racist and sexist police terror—reject the notion of dying for a rotten U.S. empire. Among polled workers under the age of 30, only 38 percent voiced a “great deal of support” for the military, down 15 percentage points from just three years ago (military.com, 3/10).
Chinese, Russian imperialists exploit U.S. debacles
The U.S. debacle in Afghanistan has handed China and Russia an opportunity to present themselves as more reliable partners in Central Asia and other regions. As most nations were forced to evacuate their embassy staff during the upheaval in Kabul, both China and Russia kept their embassies open (Foreign Policy, 9/2).
A Chinese state spokeswoman gladly poured salt in the U.S. bosses’ open wound, describing a teenager’s deadly fall from a jet as “American myth down… More and more people are awakening” (Wall Street Journal, 9/1).
While the U.S. bosses spin their wheels trying to patch their crumbling infrastructure, strengthening ties between the drug cartel known as the Taliban and Chinese imperialism will be a big boost for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has already tied more than 130 countries to the rising global powerhouse (CFR, 3/24). The more China expands its economic and military influence, the greater the risk of a big-power clash spilling into war.
Perhaps the biggest wild card in this unstable mix remains the Russian bosses, who have joined China in bashing the U.S. According to President Vladimir Putin, the U.S. achieved nothing in Afghanistan “but tragedy and loss of life” (Reuters, 9/1). Analysts believe that Biden’s abandonment of the Afghan government could embolden Russian military forces in their ongoing conflict with U.S. ally Ukraine (Atlantic Council, 8/16).
No honor among thieves—capitalist alliances waver
The so-called “Biden Doctrine,” an open rejection of “nation-building,” could spell the end of U.S. leadership of the old and faltering liberal world order. It’s also a big concern for traditional U.S. allies. The U.S. unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, said the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, was “a catastrophe for the Afghan people, for Western values and credibility and for the developing of international relations’’ (NYT, 9/4).
U.S. unreliability has led France, Italy, and Germany, among other nations, to turn to self-preservation and new affiliations. Armin Laschet, the minister-president of Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, stated that European nations needed to “lessen their dependence on the U.S.” (Washington Post, 8/31).
As the U.S. burns bridges with European leaders, it’s making overtures toward Asian nations that lie within striking distance of China. Around the same time that the suicide blast rocked the airport in Kabul, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore and Vietnam in a brazen move to curry favor (Yahoo News, 8/31). Even more ominously, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command recently laid out a proposal calling for construction of a missile chain among islands in Japan and the Philippines (Nikkei Asia, 4/16).
The international fight for communism will free our class
The imperialist bosses continue to show that they are driven by their need for maximum profits—at any and all costs to the working class. But workers continue to fight back! In Afghanistan today, the most victimized workers—including a number of women—have led fearless actions against the violent Taliban bosses, demanding safety even as they are beaten (CNN, 9/4).
These fighters have bravely displayed their allegiance to the working class despite the retaliation they knew they’d receive. But to end the brutality and oppression of capitalism, they must take the next step and join the international fight for communist revolution. Only by smashing the profit system can we end sexism, racism, and imperialist war. Join the PLP and fight to win!