Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org This was inspired by a visit
to the Ludlow Massacre Memorial and Monument in Colorado
Minerals and raw materials are the building blocks of industrial capitalism. No
industrial revolutions would have been possible without iron, coal, copper,
rubber, and similar substances. The extraction of such materials from the earth
has been, without exception, a human enterprise mired in misery, in which one
small class of persons viciously exploited other more numerous classes of
workers and peasants, with the sole aim of making as much money as possible.
Theft of land, forced migrations, enslavement, torture, murder, brutality of
every imaginable kind, injury and death on the job, the poisoning of the air,
soil, and water, even concentration camps, all giving evidence of what Marx
said more than 140 years ago: ". . . capital comes dripping from head to foot,
from every pore, with blood and dirt."
Steel is a quintessential industrial commodity, and during the nineteenth
century, its production was central to the development of the most important
capitalist industry, the railroad. However, to make steel, you need coal, which
is converted into coke, the latter needed to produce iron and steel. Coal is
found in many parts of the world, including the United States. Originally, it
was mined in deep underground cavities, and much of it still is, although
surface, strip mining now accounts for about 40 percent of all coal production
worldwide.
Underground coal mining is inherently dangerous work, but the relentless
drive of both the mine owners and the steel capitalists (often the same people)
to cut costs and increase profits makes the work lethal. At the same time, the
risk of the labor breeds a strong sense of cohesion among the workers. This
solidarity was enhanced by the remoteness of many mines, which allowed the
companies to contain miners and their families in isolated company towns, owned
lock, stock, and barrel by the mine’s owners. In a company town, almost all
economic activity was connected to mining. Social differences were clearly
marked and unbridgeable. There were the miners, and there were the bosses.
Working underground together and living above ground together created strong
social class bonds. The companies recruited a polyglot workforce to break down
the cohesiveness of the miners, but often as not this failed. In the United
States, the United Mine Workers union (UMWA) early on embraced a diverse
membership, including black miners, one of the first labor unions to do so.
Miners learned quickly that it mattered not one whit whether the shovels were
wielded by black or white hands or whether the men killed in an explosion were
Italians or Greeks or Welsh. And at the end of work day, every miner’s face was
black.
Low wages, unsafe conditions, long hours, crooked scales, and totalitarian rule
in the company towns (the companies had their own, state-deputized police)
combined to cause the workers to embrace labor unions wholeheartedly, even in
places, like rural Appalachia, where notions of rugged individualism were
strong. Any attempts to unionize were met with utmost resistance, always wed to
violence, by the coal operators. Given the array of implacable forces lined up
against them, including police, politicians, national guards, even the U.S.
Army, coal miners were, themselves, not averse to employing violent means to
achieve their aims.
The coalfields of southern Colorado were the scenes of a monumental and
ultimately murderous labor struggle in 1913 and 1914. One of the major coal
companies was the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. It maintained
company towns at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills near the mine sites,
including those of Berwind and Ludlow, south of the steel town of Pueblo.
Berwind was named for the coal baron, Edward J. Berwind, who later sold his
holdings to the Rockefeller company. More about him later.
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