1.

A.

The mine owners paid the salaries of county sheriffs and their deputies to guard their properties, collect rents from miners in company housing, assault pro-union miners and kill or run out of town union organizers. In addition, they hired gun thugs and spies from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, whose agents were also sworn in as law enforcement officials.

The use of the term “key industries” shows an openness to divide the working class while ignoring the history of the labor movement. Key industries have a large amount of domestic spying to ensure right-wing cultural dominance, threatening any presence of openly socialist organizations. This would mean prioritizing the organization of key industries, such as Amazon.com, would be high security operations.

B.

Miners were forced to sign “yellow dog” contracts that bound them not to become members of the UMWA or any other labor organization or even “aid, encourage or approve” of such an organization. Workers found in violation or even suspected of union sympathies were fired and forcibly evicted from their company-owned homes.

The existence of “yellow dog” contracts proves the necessity of uniting the entire working class so that they may unite across industries, rather than “key industries”, in response to the real failures of the capitalist system, the actual form in which the collapse of capitalism takes place. That does not mean such key industries do not deserve organizers, but, in such cases, the party must wait for them to approach and ask for assistance as the traditional labor organizations have failed them.

2.

Rank-and-file miners, led by 24-year-old Cabin Creek miner Frank Keeney, took the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the conservative UMWA national leadership and turned to the Socialist Party to hold mass meetings and provide speakers.

We can see that this process took place under the leadership of miners themselves, namely Frank Keeney. The same workers’ leaders will emerge, and they will look to the revolutionary party for a worked-out strategy to confront the state and win. Keeney proved unwilling to lead a struggle against the national government. At that point, a socialist with a revolutionary strategy should have spoken up and set about the formation of an armed struggle tied to mining, hiding itself among the miners, and combined with a general strike strategy for the entire working class.

3.

A.

The agents met with immediate resistance from the miners and their supporters, including Sid Hatfield, a former miner and the chief of police in Matewan, West Virginia, along with the town’s Mayor Cabell Testerman. On May 19, 1920, Hatfield, Testerman and an assembly of armed and deputized miners sought out Felts and his agents to enforce an arrest warrant and take them into custody. When confronted, Felts claimed to have an arrest warrant for Hatfield.

Witnesses reported that Testerman examined the supposed warrant and after proclaiming, “It’s bogus,” he was immediately shot dead by Albert Felts. Hatfield and the miners returned fire, and by the time the shooting ended nine of the 12 Baldwin-Felts agents were dead, including both Felts brothers. In addition to the mayor, two miners were killed. The clash became known as the “Matewan Massacre.”

B.

On August 1, 1921, as Hatfield was set to stand trial, Baldwin-Felts agents ambushed and killed him and his friend Ed Chambers at the entrance to the Mingo County courthouse in Welch. None of the assassins were ever held accountable.

The complete failure of the SEP electoral strategy has proven the need for a new course. The policy of running big-city lawyers or journalists for national or state executive office has proven less than inadequate. We see in the history of the miners a better way forward, as previously proposed by the Democratic Power Faction. Sid Hatfield, Chief of Police of Matewan, West Virginia sympathized with the miners because he himself was an ex-miner. Using his position, he gained influence over the mayor, who participated with him in the confrontation with the mine-owners agency.

The SEP must change course immediately and offer the workers a legitimate strategy of confronting the capitalists that must also stand a chance of bringing victories or at least stale-mates, the hope for future victories. This would mean running ex-miners, ex-manufacturers, etc. to important local offices in small towns. This would give the SEP the legitimate right to use force to gain access to the public consciousness and break down the iron curtain of censorship and persecution consisting of physical attacks and other capitalist terror tactics.

4.

“Unionization, as opposed to communism,” [John L. Lewis, UMWA President from 1921 to 1960] declared in 1937, “presupposes the relation of employment; it is based upon the wage system and it recognizes fully and unreservedly the institution of private property and the right to investment profit.” Appealing to the employers to recognize and work with the unions, he continued, “The organized workers of America, free in their industrial life, conscious partners in production, secure in their homes and enjoying a decent standard of living, will prove the finest bulwark against the intrusion of alien doctrines of government.”

There exists an unsettled confusion over the union form of struggle. Unions can increase wages and improve the material living standards of the workers. They fail, however, to provide revolutionary leadership and actively resist socialism as a threat to their source of income, labor relations based on private property. The material improvement to the workers, however, does not mean that the improvements can satisfy the workers since material improvement in itself is not sufficient. There exists an absolute minimum in material necessity for the workers, including a legal minimum for the entire working class regardless of union membership, that the unions cannot guarantee since their first allegiance is to “the institution of private property.”

To put it in practical terms, members of unions should not be expelled from the socialist party in a tit-for-tat game with the union bureaucracy. This only fuels the growth of a nano-bureaucracy, alien to the working class, within the revolutionary party. The right attitude to union members who may even demand factions within the unions, would be to allow them a separate faction within the revolutionary party. This would give them access to socialist ideas and literature which they could then distribute to the workers through or in contention with union activity. It would also associate the party, while allowing it to keep its leaders at a safe distance, with the material improvement of the lives of the working class.

5.

Thus at the 1912 annual conference the [UMWA] union voted in favour of “government ownership” of all industries, and added to the constitution the demand that miners be given “the full social value of our product”. They also, while heavily rejecting specific support of the SPA, struck out the clause within the UMWA constitution which demanded political neutrality. The more positive stance towards the SPA on behalf of the UMWA, the wider trade union movement, and the electorate generally, proved short lived, however, as divisions within the SPA, the war, state repression, and social and political changes led to a precipitous collapse in support.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44582303?read-now=1&seq=10#metadata_info_tab_contents

This history of the UMWA proves that unions did not in fact ruin the socialist movement as much as betrayal by nominally socialist bureaucrats. The divisions within the Socialist Party of America (SPA) led to a collapse of support within the unions. This in turn forced unionized workers to turn to union bureaucrats for leadership, leading to the deeper betrayal over economic interests in individual contracts combined with the larger political demands for government ownership of the means of production or industry.

It also led to greater policing of socialist demands, since the SPA “socialists” had turned against Marxism in favor of Presbyterian Minister and man of great inherited wealth, Norman Thomas. Thomas’ wife, in fact, was the grand-daughter of the financial advisor of presidents Lincoln and Cleveland and a Trustee of Princeton, a university Thomas happened to attend after receiving a largess from a newly rich uncle. Thomas’