“They shot one of those Bolsheviks up in Knox County this morning, Harry Sims his name was…That deputy knew his business. He didn’t give him a chance to talk, he just plugged him in the stomach. We need some shooting like that down in Pineville.”
Malcolm Crowley, describing in the New Republic in 1932, a gleeful account of a local coal manager and operator’s response to the murder of a 19-year-old young Communist League union organizer in eastern Kentucky.
Growing up in Kentucky, I’ve heard every slur and screed against us. That we are inbred, dumb, yokel, toothless, bumpkin rednecks. But nothing could be further from the truth. Kentucky is a great and gorgeous state full of natural beauty and has produced many great minds. It’s the ruling class elite “southern gentry” who have exploited the commonwealth and the rest of the southern poor. These are the same privileged, soft, aristocrat bigots who lied to underclass white peasantry by stoking their hatred and fear to defend slavery for the Confederacy because they were too much of miserable misers to pay workers fairly. Not only in their reprehensible treachery did they view Africans as subhuman, but slavery was also used to keep wages as low as possible for non-slave laborers. Like today’s right wing demonizing immigrants as a threat taking jobs away from Americans, the old right wing; the Confederate ruling class, used the threat of abolition to scare whites into thinking that freed slaves would take their jobs. Right wing is a right wing does. The political parties may have changed and realigned over time, but the ideology is still the same. The legacy of this “elite southern gentry” still maintains its grip on the Southeastern US using the same old tactics of puritanical evangelical Christian brainwashing and divisive racism to maintain their control just like they used the bible to justify slavery since they did before the Civil War. The genuine forgotten fact is that within the insult of “redneck” is not just an insult to the sunburned hide of the underclass, but more accurately therein lies an esoteric compliment to leftists.
Let’s first examine the origins of the insult of “redneck”. The term is known best as an insult for rural folk and “hillbillies” from the hollers, but in one chapter of Appalachian history “redneck” was also used to instigate aversion and spread panic of communist militants and oppress organized mine workers. During this burgeoning movement of coal worker cooperation, ruling class merchant monopolist coal barons attempted to crush their efforts through violent suppression using privatized security firms such as Pinkerton, in conjunction with the national guard and all divisions of law enforcement. Many state police forces were formed to crush labor uprisings. These organized mine workers were then associated by law enforcement and corporate security forces as in cahoots with the commie international “reds” and dubbed “Rednecks”. Some were identified and categorized by the capitalist authorities through the symbolic red scarves they were said to wear.
Some of the most revered, and revolutionary instances in the history of the US labor movement are centered around Kentucky and the surrounding Appalachian region. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in U.S. history, where private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. An amalgamation of poison gas and explosive bomb remnants from World War I were dropped in multiple locations. Our own country bombed our own citizens. May those workers who died in rebellion against oppression and exploitation forever rest in power.
Our own military, police force, and private mercenary groups were deployed against citizen workers on strike and fighting for not only the most fundamental rights of dignity and freedom from exploitation, but for organized labor rights. During the infamous Coal Wars, an entire system of corporate exploitation and servitude of poor workers was developed, from the “company town” to being paid in the fiat “company script” which could only be spent in the jurisdiction of businesses’ borders. The later destitution of the agrarian rural dust bowl sharecropper serfs who also attempted organization of their labor was met with the brut force of the wealthy landowners and their armed goons. Now today, this model has been modernized and slapped with a fresh coat of multinational megacorporate coating. Beneath this emergency bandaged beautification, is the same old rotting system, in full decay like a forgotten wound re-exposed in all its wide-open vulnerability, and here we are.
The same privileged corporatists with their private security forces: the billionaire elite from the captain of industry era, oppress the international working class today in the reinvented form of corporate billionaire oligarchy. True “Pirate politics” supports rank and file labor organization, demands global expropriation of the wealth of the ruling elite and the equal distribution of healthy food, clean water, equality of technology, renewable energy and 100% egalitarian efficiency of global economy. This includes socialization of natural resources, utilities, and the power grid.
Whether we hail from Eastern Kentucky or West Virginia, we are the descendants of the Appalachian struggle, which continues today, as this region is the poorest in the entire US. This overlooked past was not taught to us in school. Learn more about this forgotten history and visit the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum:
Sixteen Tons
Song by Tennessee Ernie Ford
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said, “Well, a-bless my soul”
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin’, it was drizzlin’ rain
Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake by an ol’ mama lion
Can’t no high toned woman make me walk the line
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
If you see me comin’, better step aside
A lotta men didn’t, a lotta men died
One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don’t get you
Then the left one will
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
Kentucky Pirate Party 