By John Pickard
An excellent article appeared this week, in the Financial Times weekend magazine of all places, showing a glimpse of the shifting consciousness of the working class in America.
The impression is sometimes given over here that US workers are overwhelmingly in support of Trump and ‘Trumpism’, and none more so than the ‘rednecks’ in states like West Virginia. But as the Financial Times journalist, Edward Luce, pointed out, that common perception is far from the truth. Even the word ‘redneck’ has history. It is usually used today to describe those poor whites who cling onto racism in the hope of protecting their marginal advantages over poor black workers. But as the article points out, in West Virginia the red necktie was historically the token of the most militant sections of the working class, particularly the miners.
Indeed, West Virginia was the scene of the bloodiest-ever confrontation in US labour history, in 1921, when 10,000 striking miners fought a pitched battle with 3,000 national guards and private company forces, leading to dozens of lives lost and hundreds wounded. This was the famous Battle of Blair Mountain. So the state has a harsh history of class struggle.
Politics completely tied to big business
If you want to know why the state voted for Trump in 2016, you only have to look at the fact that West Virginia has one of the highest levels of deprivation in the USA. The per capita income of the state, at $25,000, is less than half the national average. A child born in West Virginia, Luce points out, “has a greater chance of dying from opioids than of becoming a doctor…One small town, Williamson, with a population of just 3,000, shipped in more than 20 million opioid pills, mostly oxycodone hydrocodone, in a seven-year period.” (Financial Times magazine, June 29).
The political system of the state is completely tied up with business interests. Mines have closed largely due to fracking not imported coal. Farming has also been blighted by fracking, with aquifers polluted, poor compensation paid for land seizures and big companies squeezing the profit-margins of small-scale suppliers. A handful of big agribusiness companies completely control the lives of small farmers and many are being driven to the wall, like something out of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. One farmer quoted by Luce refers to the big companies in these terms: “They control everything you do, without taking any responsibility for it…these companies are greedy bastards. They control West Virginia and Washington.” Not surprisingly, the fastest rate of suicide growth in West Virginia is among farmers.
State Democrats and Republicans indistinguishable
Like in traditional Labour-supporting areas such as the north-east of England, there is a perception among workers in the state that what they saw as ‘their’ party – the Democratic Party – has let them down, despite their unstinting support for it over many years. They aren’t wrong either: in West Virginia, the Democrats and Republicans are virtually identical; both are completely in the pockets of big business. The current Democratic senator and former governor, Joe Manchin, votes with Trump most of the time in the Senate. When he was governor in the early 2000s, Manchin slashed corporation taxes. “Partly as a result, West Virginia now comes last out of 50 states on surveys of quality of infrastructure. It comes close to the bottom on almost every other indicator, including lifespan and rates of college education.” Manchin is personally very wealthy, partly through his investments in coal, something that will not be lost on the mining communities in the state.
It was as a result of these levels of deprivation and the understandable feeling that they had been neglected that voters turned to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, giving him 68 per cent of the vote. Hillary Clinton was seen as just another creature of Wall Street, someone who one wag said “sounded like she was lying, even when she was telling the truth.” She got a miserable 26 per cent of the vote, which taking into account the turnout, translates to around one seventh of the electorate. Yet some polls show that if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate, he would have defeated Trump by 48 to 46 per cent.
“…what West Virginian once was…”
Given the history of poor investment in the state, it should not have been entirely surprising that the 2018 teachers’ struggles took off in West Virginia. When the teachers’ movement started they took up the red necktie because, as one of the organisers, Jay O’Neal told Luce, “We went ‘red’ because we wanted to harken back to what West Virginian once was.” Jay and fellow teacher, Emily Cromer, organised a strike against the pitifully poor conditions and squeezed wages and fought for all education workers, successfully winning improvements in wages and in education spending. And this was in a state with ‘right-to-work’ laws that worked against union organisation and recruitment.
The strike organisers used social media and appealed successfully for support among all education workers, students and parents. The strike organisers were forced to work around the official structures of their union because the ‘leadership’ of the union were either too slow or unwilling to act at all. The success of the West Virginia teaches was quickly followed by similar strikes of education workers across other states: Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky and elsewhere. Time Magazine even named strike leaders O’Neal and Cromer in their top 100 most influential people of 2018.
Democratic Party going through convulsions
The teachers’ strike was an indication of a new mood among workers in West Virginia. The Democratic Party in the state is now going through the same convulsions as the party is going through nationally, with younger, more radical candidates coming forward to challenge Manchin and big-business politics. It is now the ‘norm’ among Democratic Party presidential hopefuls to advocate universal health care and wealth taxes and anti-austerity measures, because it chimes with the sentiments now being felt by the big majority of the American population. How successful these ‘left’ Democratic candidates can be against a party machine organically linked to business and wealthy backers is another matter, but at least these movements are an indication of changes taking place right across the USA.
There has been a generalised upswing in strikes and struggles in the USA, something rarely reported in the British press. The number of strikes has increased dramatically. In 2018 there were more strikes in the USA than at any time since Ronald Reagan was president. There were ten times as many days lost through strikes last year than in 2016, when Trump was elected.
According to opinion polls, ‘socialism’ is more popular among younger people that ‘capitalism’.. The Democratic Socialists of America is now an organisation of around 70,000 members, overwhelmingly young people. There is a lot of room for discussion about what exactly this ‘socialism’ means, but these things are an undeniable indications of a shift in consciousness among American workers that has not been seen for generations. It is hardly surprising, with workers’ living standards having stagnated for decades that things are beginning to change. The surprise is that it has taken so long. As the Financial Times points out, even the rednecks are turning red.
July 2, 2019
