Companies like Arch Mineral and A.T. Massey have staked their claim to the very shape of the land that workers live in. They shear off the tops of mountains and dump the rocky overburden into nearby streams and valleys. That's mountaintop removal, and its purpose is to expose to the profit-seeking coal barons the same rich seams of coal otherwise mined by more expensive underground methods.
Opposition within the state is definitely simmering, including a recent protest of 400 in Boone County July 26. According to coverage in the Charleston Gazette, Secretary of State Ken Hechler spoke at the rally comparing the fight against mountaintop removal to the Black Lung struggle in the late '60s. (Hechler won notoriety as one of the first Democratic Party politicians to back the rank-and-file movement that changed what the world thought of coal miners when they won the first significant Black Lung legislation in 1969.)
In an earlier interview, Kayford Mountain resident Larry Gibson described the scope of this method of strip mining: "You used to look up at the mountain. Now you look down on it." Carlos Gore's backyard in Logan County is pelted by softball-size rocks from blasting at Arch Coal's nearby strip mine. And Vicky Moore described blasting dust so thick she can't see her neighbor's homes or drive without headlights on a sunny day.
As residential roads are used for haulage, dusty hazardous conditions proliferate throughout the state, including Northern West Virginia, where I was able to join in a protest around this issue.
This past legislative session coal companies expanded their right to fill in streams and creeks. Through the 1960s strip mining accounted for only around 10 percent of West Virginia's coal production. Now, about one-third of all West Virginia coal is the product of strip mining.
After they've removed the coal, the energy barons have little trouble bypassing laws that call for them to reclaim the environment. They close union underground mines; throw hundreds of union members out of work; take off the top of the mountain and strip the coal at bargain rates; and leave the community on a poverty-stricken, gouged-out, poisoned piece of turf in danger of disastrous flooding.
But the opposition that is simmering throughout southern West Virginia on this issue shows the potential for something else as well - the expansion of working-class resistance and new links among fighters.
Dave Salner
Morgantown, West Virginia
U.S. lost the Cold War
A decade ago when the "Soviet bloc" of bureaucratized
worker states began collapsing, there was great euphoria among
the ruling capitalist classes and their entourage of pundits
and cheerleaders in the U.S. and Western Europe. Over and
over, they told us the "Cold War" had been "won" by "western
democracies" and capitalism!
Back then the Militant stood alone in correctly saying that this collapse was a historic gain not for the imperialists but rather for the workers and farmers around the world. The recent events in Russia, the core of the old Soviet Union, show beyond a doubt that it is the capitalists who suffered the great defeat.
It could not been otherwise. Western propagandists of a decade ago told us that, with the collapse of "communism" in the Soviet sphere, the old Bloc countries and Russia could now be rebuilt as "democratic, market-driven" capitalist societies. Soon we would have "modern" countries, just like the U.S., Britain or Germany.
The real objective and hope of the American and European capitalists is not the creation of great imperial capitalist countries comparable to and competitive with their own. Rather it was and is the restoration of capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe on the basis of nothing other than the most abject "modern" form of advanced colonialism: with the key industrial, financial and commercial sectors owned and controlled by American and other imperialists; with only marginal sectors, the "crumbs" if you will, "owned" with heavy debt by the totally dependent, weak indigenous capitalists; and with governments subordinate to the imperialists that are strong enough (forget about the window-dressing of "democracy") to control the powerful working class!
For their part, the Stalinist bureaucrats that rule as privileged, parasitic castes over the Eastern European and Soviet worker states had great illusions themselves. Knowing that their old systems were collapsing they had great hopes of metamorphosing into modern, imperial capitalists; even the more realist among them hoped to at least become partners with the real imperialists after the restoration of capitalism in their countries. A decade into this dream now, many of them no longer harbor such illusions and desperately long for the past.
Unfortunately for all these thieves, their day will never come to pass. Stalinists and imperialists alike totally misjudged the world and domestic stage as the crisis unfolded beginning in 1989. Neither had any idea of power and resiliency of the workers and farmers over whom they intended to rule and exploit. Like all narrow-thinking rulers before them, they dismissed the workers as beaten, tamed, and ready for capitalist restoration. Unfortunately for all these rulers and exploiters the workers are not only undefeated but also showing clear signs that their fighting spirit is being reborn. Very big battles lie ahead.
Walt Snyder
Clifton Park, New York
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