By SoDak
The most productive hours of our days we spend working, jobs which are generally alienating, painful, and demoralizing. By the time we finish our shifts, we are exhausted, too tired to accomplish anything significant. Lacking any other means of survival, we sell our labor power to earn wages to purchase those things we need to survive, including plenty of items to entertain/distract us. The owners, seeking to maximize profits and expand production, regulate the pace of work and control the process in order to squeeze as much surplus from us as possible. Our misery generates their profits. The days and years disappear, as our minds and bodies are destroyed, while we continue to dream of retirement, simply to escape from the daily drudgery.
The compilation record Coal Mining Women is an important historical document, detailing the exploitation that takes place under capitalism and the struggles of working people against the coal companies. It consists of twenty songs, sung by folksingers who grew up in coal country such as Hazel Dickens, Phyllis Boyens, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Florence Reece, and Reel World String Band. The songs give me chills every time I listen to them. Gunning’s “Dreadful Memories” recounts the poverty and starvation experienced by miners, as the Kentucky coal company hired “gun thugs” to threaten workers who dared to organize. It is a live recording, when she was quite old. Her voice is weathered, yet tender and defiant. I really wish Gunning’s song “I Hate the Capitalist System” was included on this compilation, as it would have fit in perfectly, describing the stark inequality that capitalist growth creates. Boyens’s “Lawrence Jones” notes that there is “one man dead on that Harlan County line” due to the violence employed by the coal company. On “Black Lung,” Dickens provides a haunting account of how this disease destroyed the lives of so many workers, digging coal underground. Companies simply turned their backs on the workers, replacing those who were sick and those who died with new workers. She sings,
You ain’t even covered in their medical plans
And your life depends on the favors of man
Down in the poor house on starvation’s plan
Where pride is a stranger and doomed is a man
His soul full of coal dust till his body’s decayed
And everyone but black lung’s done turned him away
Black lung, black lung, oh your hand’s icy cold
As you reach for my life and you torture my soul
Cold as that water hole down in that dark cave
Where I spent my life’s blood diggin’ my own grave
Down at the graveyard the boss man came
With his little bunch of flowers, dear God what a shame
Take back those flowers, don’t you sing no sad songs
The die has been cast now, a good man is gone.
Death is ever present throughout these songs, especially those that are focused on mining accidents, such as Dickens’s “The Mannington Mine Disaster.” These songs are written so we do not forget how capitalist companies cut corners, creating unsafe conditions to reduce production costs. Here social murder is embedded throughout the existing economic system. Additionally, as Gunning explains, these mining operations are destroying the beauty of the mountains and poisoning the water.
The songs on Coal Mining Women also speak to mobilization, resistance, protest, and revolution. It is clear what is at stake. As Gunning sings on “Come All You Coal Miners,”
l was born in old Kentucky, in a coal camp born and bred,
I know all about the pinto beans, bulldog gravy and cornbread,
And I know how the coal miners work and slave in the coal mines every day
For a dollar in the company store, for that is all they pay.
Coal mining is the most dangerous work in our land today
With plenty of dirty, slaving work, and very little pay.
Coal miner, won’t you wake up, and open your eyes and see
What the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me.
They take your very life blood, they take our children’s lives
They take fathers away from children, and husbands away from wives.
Oh miner, won’t you organize wherever you may be
And make this a land of freedom for workers like you and me.
Dickens, on “They’ll Never Keep Us Down,” celebrates the solidarity of a radical labor movement, pointing out that all improvements in wages and quality of life have been fought for, challenging the interests of the bosses. Within this song, there is a recognition that this struggle is a constant one, given the exploitive system predicated upon capital accumulation. This point is important to keep in mind, especially as coal companies attempt to convince workers that they have the same interests. The question remains, “which side are you on”: that of the capitalist or the rest of humanity?
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