Thread by @bombsfall

Today is the 100th anniversary of the The Battle Of Blair Mountain, a huge moment in US history and one most people have never heard of, a shooting fight involving thousands of workers vs the forces of capital in the mountains of West Virginia. #Blair100

This is a good quick summary of things -> inthesetimes.com/article/labor-…
If you have 40 minutes this podcast is also great and contains a lot of great info-> empathymedialab.com/post/the-road-…

If you've followed me for awhile you know how core this kind of thing is to our politics over here, the struggle against capital by organized people who have just had enough of it. And there is a huge history of that which we in the US have been denied, completely by design.

The enormity of what has been inflicted on people, the sheer amount of misery, is staggering. In ways that aren't often discussed outside of the immediate radius. Take company towns for instance. @thetrillbillies give a good quick rundown here.

@thetrillbillies Bethany and I do a lot of researching and traveling out to places like this. Often times we're just finding the ruins of them out in the woods, long abandoned. That newspaper clipping from when the town was still around is nightmarish.

@thetrillbillies And sometimes we're visiting places that survived the companies that used to run them.

And sometimes we end up in the still-warm corpse of a place, doomed by what it was from the very start.

https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/1341221763523473408

Company towns are just some of the more egregious but still relatively little known examples. But think about how our country has handled Covid. How it is currently handling Covid. Think about how the precariousness of low-paid at-risk workers was used to keep them working.

This all runs on the fear of privation, ruin, and death. Or debt that just eats you alive over the span of years. And yet most any pushback against capital is villified and ridiculed, and our long history of people fighting back is denied us. For, you know, some reason.

These things we deal with aren't new, they aren't things some particular recent generation figured out and started whining about out of nowhere. These were known issues from the start. Change some details and this could be a shitpost from now.

https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/1158147734655950850

Anyway this is everywhere. Say what you will about tactics or wisdom or whatever when it comes to battling company stooges, hired thugs, state police, national guard, and aerial bombardment, but I certainly understand why it happened, and respect the hell out of those who did it.

While we're on the topic of big wild instances of violent suppression of organized labor that most people haven't heard of, check this out

https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/1363032943778799616