Can we, for a moment, get some Fs rolling in chat for strong ass, beautiful ass horses. Intense horse vibes, intense horse energy, horses are some real shit. America and horses. Wade through the lore, many a horse-based canon surrounding America. The first trucks to mud, really, if you think about it, sort of the first kind of F-16. Freedom, whatever, frontiers and wars, trade routes, these little guys were there kicking. We got statues of horses. The American workhorse, the American stud, Colt M-16, the Broncos were serious champions, on and on. And so, here in our modern world, there are other ways we can feel that pure connection to horses. There are certain conflicts the efficiency of modern husbandry creates, the results of which are called stable vices. There are basic needs for a healthy horse – social interaction, locomotion, forage of unprocessed foods – and most of these are ignored within modern husbandry. Domestication does not alter these needs. What does happen though, are self-destructive behaviors done reflexively. They stand in the stall kicking the walls until their legs break, they dig until lame. They ‘weave’, rocking back and forth uncontrollably, wearing down their legs and losing weight quickly. ‘Stall-walking’, where they compulsively walk in place until they can’t. They bite horses in adjacent stalls so they must be isolated further. They ‘bolt’ feed, eating too fast until they choke. They masturbate over and over until their dicks are destroyed. The thing about a stable vice is that once the vice manifests, it is for keeps. There is an alteration in the brain that occurs, making the stable vice impossible to eliminate. There are stopgap ‘cures’, like putting a ball in the stall or more exercise or feeding larger quantities of low quality food, to keep the horse busy, but eventually the horse will revert back to the vice. In extreme cases, the horse must be restrained until it calms down, otherwise it would endanger itself and any other horses around it, but the behavior will resume shortly after the horse is released. Primarily, boredom and isolation are the cause and in the end, further isolation is required to protected the separated, stabled herd. I wonder if any of you see yourself in horses the way I see myself. Maybe I am, finally, a horse guy.

Being alive, now, feels more and more like some invisible trash compactor ratcheting one way, like you are an alien, abandoned sovereign agent of uncertain purpose or origin – and I think there are some explanations, incomplete ones, for why it is like this, but we’ll have to take the long way around. American democracy was necessary to avoid power transferring to an ‘unruly’ mob. If there was a shared fear among the founding fathers, it was mob rule and ‘the beast’ that is the people. How we understand this is through the scars of lynch mobs and so it’s easy to read noble grace in our founders, as if like clockwork augurs they had laid out some universal stopgate to an ancient evil mechanism couched fickle yet inevitable in human nature. But the founders did not quite have that history, an unruly mob was a different thing. These were learned (and wealthy) men who had seen and knew the unruly mob – it was a reoccurring mass of peasants and serfs and tenants storming the fortifications of lords, a scream power must answer, and in this way, a social balance was maintained. Power must negotiate with its subjects or be culled. The mob may be suppressed, they may leave to rise again, they may overrun the castle, but they must be negotiated with. Simply, class struggle. The founding fathers were not interested in negotiations. Baked into our Constitution are the tools to suppress the lower classes and so it is not especially curious why it is the second oldest constitution in the world. Not only that, but several convergent elements made it uniquely possible to rule the mob free of insurrection: the isolation of the New World from the major threats of the Old World empires while retaining the benefits of their histories and technologies, a plethora of unclaimed and untapped resources, and most importantly, space. In the Old World, the biggest reason the rulers had to negotiate with the subjugated was because there was no escape from them – it was in the best interest of nobility to hold the social balance. Remember that the first European settlers to North America were essentially poor rabble, the new lands were a newly found pressure valve to long-standing class struggle, a valve that was made largely unavailable by the American Revolution. The founders recognized this and so could sever the economic from the social, side stepping for a protracted period of time the class problems that would boil up in Europe in the coming century. When the struggle did reach the States, a series of systems were already established to aid in dismantling it. The frontier allowed a promise of a better future for the poor, creating a buffer between power and the mob, halting the social progress that would be made across the ocean. This is the seed for why the US is without a dedicated working class political party.

As early as 1790, the model for how shit was going to go down was established: The Whiskey Rebellion. Its components should be recognizable. To recoup the debts of the Revolution, the Federal government imposed a tax on distilled spirits. Because America had all this new farmland and because the easiest way to transport crops overseas for trade was to make it into alcohol, one of the most important exports was distilled spirits. Big distilleries, located close to the coast and owned by those ruling, paid half the tax that small ones did. The further you got from the Atlantic, the poorer the people were and the smaller the distilleries. The people were cash-poor as well and alcohol was used as the dominant currency and often, because their crops would spoil crossing the Appalachian Mountains, they would have to distill them to make a profit. So these things compounded – not only are you taxed double, your income is taxed and your ability to make income is taxed. One last kick in the head, the only way to pay the tax was to travel hundreds of miles to the federal tax office in Philadelphia. The mob raised a militia 600 strong and said they would not pay. In between sick flows and bars and raping his legal property, Treasurer Alexander ‘The People Are A Great Beast’ Hamilton told the mob to go fuck themselves and Prez Washington slung the big dick and marched a rival militia of 13,000 on Western PA, crushing the rebellion – an early gem in the American tradition of using the poor to raze the poor. This was ostensibly the first working class movement in United States history and it was put down by overwhelming numbers and force.

Violence and vengeance is the standard US response to class struggle and the States could monopolize violence against the working class in a way that the social structures of Europe wouldn’t allow. Capitalism emerged from a merchant class being released from the divine rule of nobility and allowed to take the place of nobility – though not entirely free of the notion of being god appointed. And Capitalism requires conquest. A line can be traced within our borders from the native genocide for lands, to the slaves to work the lands, to the pour of immigrants subjugated in their home countries only to be fodder in our industrialization, to ultimately our forever wars of today. There must be a lower class to exploit, even if it must be imported, even if you must go to it. The most important lesson of American slavery and the Civil War was the value of the slave class – a working class revolt is a social crisis made of citizenry that must be negotiated with, but a slave revolt is an existential threat to the State and must be destroyed – so to maintain Capitalism, a slave class must be maintained.

Okay, so we can’t do slavery anymore, slavery is canceled and Bad, but luckily the founders DM’d hard and had planned ahead. In a system defined only through goods and commodities, the underclass’s labor is understood not as an essential mechanism of the system but as a traded commodity – your time, your energy, your life is the capital you have to trade, like steel or wheat. Your life an abstracted currency for the market, so to organize, strike, revolt is to obstruct the freedom of trade and contract and is met with swift violence as it is a direct threat to the soul of the whole yoke. You become not people of the nation but a threat to it congenitally. There are now more advanced and clever mechanisms to split the poor into pockets of others, but this is the foundation. The response to it, though, remains unchanged : violence and vengeance.

A series of ‘failed’ revolutions spread across Europe in 1848 –‘the turning point in modern history that modern history failed to turn’ – and though there was not regime change, what did change was how the people understood themselves in relation to their rulers, that they held power when banded. Given time, their children and children’s children would remember and eventually nascent class consciousness would come to America with immigrants, and of course, so would horrific tragedies. True heads know what’s up, because what is a greatest hits collection without the Haymarket Massacre? Technology advances and so brings industry, and the conquest continues with floods of poor immigrants to the churning, hellish factories of Chicago. At $1.50 a day, six days a week, for ten hours a day, you could perhaps manage a place to stay and to not starve – or you could live in the street and beg, or you could always make a pass at going west. There will be another who will take the position. Sometimes someone’s maimed in the machines, sometimes the toxins and filth of the workplace makes someone sick. There will be another who will take the position. How much can a people take? They do not own the factories so it did not particularly matter. Labor began to form unions piecemeal as factory owners fired their members, hired private forces to beat union workers and leaders, paid for sympathetic news coverage to further clarify who was the good guys and who were the unamerican scum, placed plants in the unions’ ranks to divide them across ethnic lines, bribed the police to storm meetings and homes – burn their homes and lock members away in cells. And somehow, the movement survived – and not just in Chicago but onward to the other industrial heart valves of America – and in a moment of beauty and compassion and unity, in a stunning display of humanity, on May 1st, 1886, almost half a million workers across America stood together and went on strike, taking the streets, for each other. Together, all as equals. This is why we march on May Day. But, remember, violence and vengeance for the mob. March 3rd in Chicago, the factory owners had shipped in workers from across the state to break the picket line, under a garrison of 400 police officers and company men. By the end of the work day, the garrison had fired on the striker picket. The union rallied and on day four of the strike, some 80,000 workers and families gathered on Michigan Ave – the police and company forces moved to brutally disperse the march, a bomb goes off, the police and company men open fire on the crowd, butchering them while a light rain fell. Eight prominent leftists were arrested for the bombing, though no evidence could be produced. One got fifteen years, two life sentences, one committed suicide in chains, and the remaining four were hung on November 11th, 1887 – only to be pardoned by Governor Altgeld five years later. They were the Haymarket Martyrs.

The protection of property is welded deep into the Constitution because it was foremost created to protect the merchant class, and as technology turns to industrial mass production at the turn of the century, these protections go haywire and the conquest of Capitalism hyper-accelerates. The frontier closes, power and wealth consolidate rapidly, and the very nature of work changes – what is set in motion is a long, long grinding down and cheapening of human life and experience, where what is done to survive is rended from the land and survival is transferred to more abstract modes removed from immediate senses of purpose. Now, to stay alive, you do not till the soil, you do not learn some meaningful craft or skill set, but you stand on a work floor, doing one task over and over, seeing through a murky keyhole a piece of a product you do not own and feel no connection to and that you have no connection to. Production is now cruelty tailored for efficiency and speed, now instead of ten workers to craft a thing, the work is broken into a hundred different parts of an assembly line, until the production gets so abstract and hollow, a hundred workers each doing a single mundane thing over and over again all day, for days and then for years, for a thousandth of the worth. Turning a screw over and over. Watching cans move down a conveyor. Such annihilating boredom never seen before, reserved just for the poor – and for the poor to feel grateful for. And now entirely, your time and well being is assigned a value and this value is how you are understood by the world and the whole of your power. What now are you attached to and what do you mean to it. This is alienation, the tasks you do to simply live being drained of relation and meaning. This is a genuine new thing in the history of the world and it was brought by capitalism. What is the human cost of that? It doesn’t matter because you do not own the factory.

We might as well address the shitty elephant in this sad, garbage history: the police and police unions. Its perhaps not shocking that the first formal policing institution in America was the Slave Patrol, established in 1704 from select members of state militias in South Carolina before the rest of the colonies quickly followed their lead. In fact, The Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel were initially founded to instill a mil-spec command structure and method to the patrols. They captured escaped slaves, of course, but the crueler and more terrorizing purpose was to detect and destroy any gathering of slaves outside of work hours to shunt even the possibility of rebellion. And so, onward to surging of immigrants and urbanization of the 1800s, business owners and the wealthy in developing townships and cities began pulling from the patrols’ ranks to create our first modern police forces. Before, their storefronts and labor yards were protected from the mob by costly private security forces, but now they could be secured by tax. On the local level, eventually to be adopted federally, we have the first emergence of ‘Public Order’ crimes. Public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, property damage, illegal gambling – generally, crimes that threaten a nebulous order, crimes of moral ‘failing’ that could damage society and its norms. If those who control the police, own the gambling houses, own the taverns, own the property have public order laws at their disposal, who is most effected by them? It is easy to see what a perfect pry bar this is to stratify the classes – and it has a built-in mechanism of moral proselytizing on a social level, making the lawbreakers enemies of society instead of members of it, a class of citizenry invariably sanctioned for exploit in the conquest. It’s so perfect that this pry bar is still used today, in more advanced and serpentine ways, but much the same. As European ideas of class struggle reach the States, police are the primary force to strike bust. On days leading up to strikes or assemblies, a steady flow of public order arrests are made. With the technology, alarm boxes are set up – locked boxes used to call the police and keyed for business owners. The response is overwhelming force and brutality, violence and vengeance, not negotiation. Police are the gasket between power and the mob, keeping the hierarchy from blowing apart under pressure. Whether it is people or physical spaces or social power, the police protect those who claim these as their property. And when even the police begin to feel the weight of capitalist ravages, they turn to unionize, though not by name – you get cabal-sounding groups like the Fraternal Order of Police – and they distance themselves largely from the labor movement (imagine shitting all over your neighbor every day but still trying to keep the ‘we cool?’ vibes), but are understandably effective because the ruling class had given them power to swing to enshrine themselves. In the organized labor deserts of our current time, one doesn’t have to wonder very hard why police unions have remained not only untouched but gotten more powerful.

If there was a golden age for the American Labor movement, just before and after World War 1 was it. The unions grew through many bloody, very literal battles – more losses than ‘victories’, but like the revolts of 1848, what changes is the way the mob understands their relation to their keepers. As the people’s power swells through numbers and bravery, American capitalism (and global capitalism) hits its first crisis – a crisis it is ill-equipped to solve because it is a crisis intrinsic to the system – the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The Roosevelt administration was ‘sympathetic’ to labor, not because of some altruistic, nice guy vibes, but because the UMWA (coal unions), the AFL (trade unions), and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (‘unskilled’ labor unions) held a fucking gun to the head of the whole capitalist class. The National Industrial Recovery Act of ‘33 for collective bargaining, the Wagner Act of ‘35 forcing businesses to negotiate with labor, and the mother fuckin’ New Deal were all signed because power was scared of a revolution – the people forced the hand of the State with the threat of overthrow and a general bodying of bougie parasite pisspigs. Not just here in America either, global capitalism was in a desperate, existential crisis – labor and socialist movements swept all through Europe, through France, Italy, and of course Germany. But as the saying goes, much like we are seeing today, when capitalism is in crisis, there are two ways: socialism or barbarism. Like a dark immune system, Fascism rises and the movements are crushed. World War Two begins.

What is most important to grip about capitalism in an industrial age, because of the necessity of conquest and exploitation, it must be a global project – and for socialism to truly work, it too must be a global project. After the war, this is what the US and the Soviets set out to do. In the wreckage of the war, the US has emerged as the dominant manufacturing powerhouse, allowing the capitalist class to make money hand over fist, consolidating power faster than before and far more totally and sweeping. So, with less materials and less manpower, companies can produce more and there is no global competition, the biggest expenditure is the cost of the labor force so that is where, on the surface, you apply the pressure – and what this does is shift the frame of the class struggle and shapes it for years to come, because the real power is in the houses of governance and in the background you secure those avenues while up front you force the mob to focus on short term goals like working conditions and wages, goals which eventually can be undone (and will be undone) as long as the real battle for legislation and representation is won. The obstacle then is those in labor with aims beyond, with eyes on social revolution and reform, the leftists, the socialists, the anarchists. And now there is an even stronger tool to wield against the working class and those radicals with loftier ambitions – conflation with a hostile, foreign power in the form of the Red Scare.

The ‘Dirty Red’ tactic was not new at the time (lol, that tactic is on some zombie shit, what up msm), but now it had a little more heat to it. Any talk of an equal shake between haves and have-nots has this direct threat of being a traitor to the nation and unamerican. Again, the conquest of capitalism, the creation of a slave class authorized to be sacrificed. The biggest protections for the workers movement is the legislation of the ‘30s, so that must go, but in the meantime, wage a war of culture, tie poverty (and with that, race) to moral failure, seal together democracy and capitalism as if in a tomb, posit that perhaps anyone calling attention to the disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the nation is in fact an enemy to the very fabric of civilization and the country’s survival. This last bit is kind of a paradox – how can your own citizens, who make up the country, be a threat to it? Who, then, is the ‘real’ country? With radio, every home in America has a box in it to connect them to the country and a top down media structure expands and speeds up, so this campaign of separation can bloom homogeneously nationwide. Because of the nature of the police, many unions turn to organized crime for protection and muscle, and this will bring with it corruption and begin to erode the larger goals of democratizing work places. After all, what is organized crime but an unauthorized capitalist class. A cultural link between crime and collectivism is cemented in public consciousness. A grim stage for the future of the working class movement is set.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is an American tragedy so far-reaching and doom-laden that it should be seen less as legislation and more for what it is, which is a Faustian bargain for the soul of the American people. More than anything, it voided our future. Taft-Hartley outlaws closed shops which required industries to only employ unions and then outlaws strikes not carried out by a union. It bans unions from being able to support political campaigns and lobby for legislation. It de-fangs strikes in general, requiring unions to give 80 days notice before striking. It gives employers the right to actively oppose unions and bust them before they can be started. It gave federal courts the power to hold workers and unions liable for lost profit and ‘damages’ taken by employers during a strike. It allowed supervisors to be fired by employers for being pro-labor, no questions asked. And finally, it required unions to purge ‘radicals’ from their rosters as political dissidents of the State. Taft-Hartley took all the power from the workers and gave it neatly back to the corporations – it remains in effect today and has marred the collective soul of our country deeper than perhaps any other one thing. Its shadow has chilled the flesh of our citizens and upon touch, there is an eerie, powerless corpse quality seemingly unshakable. There was a time before this, know why we are buried in muck.

Next comes McCarthyism and it should be unsurprising we understand the cultural context of that era via fired and blacklisted elites in Hollywood and academia. They were the most visible targets and an effective smoke screen to the real causalities – unknown masses of union members and labor organizers were jailed, purged, lost forever. Finally, following the legacy of our founders, the economic is severed from the social, class from the political, like a scam prophecy eagerly fulfilled. What is also forged is another gasket to the assembly of power, the forming and solidify of a managerial class – a class between the capitalists and the worker, a class of the worker elevated to protect the interests of the wealthy, sort of a bureaucratic cop. Another pry bar to stratify the underclass. And to comes the suburbs, creating a tangible booby prize and a direly held myth of a ‘middle class’ - working class continually rended, the people separate under false arrangements of merit and morals informed by material wealth and ethnicity. The range of available fodder for conquest is fleshed out in greater complexity and subject to different, acceptable degrees of exploitation. The Civil Rights movement is used by the powerful and wealthy to divide us further, Vietnam fractures us even more, and when one last push for equality and change in the power structures of America is attempted, it is a death rattle to be lost in echoing, dissonant noise.

By 1970s, American Capitalism was again at a crisis point, reaping the fruits of what it had long ago planted. To fight the Soviets, the States rebuilt nations into a capitalist imprints of itself and now all these years later it finally had competition and a challenge to its producing supremacy. Cheaper imports overtook American goods. The Keynesian model was finally tested and it fucking fell on its face. Inflation and unemployment sky rocket. As it turns out, if you form your whole ideology around giving companies control over the whole yoke with the sole aim of maximizing their profits above your citizens, they literally will not give a fuck about you. There is no noble capitalist, there is no empathy to be found when the core of the system rewards selfish transactions of wealth for human life. Big ol’ shocked face, fam. Functionally, long stripped of leftist, unions were an extension of management. Given enough time, capitalism co-opts all forms of resistance to it – unions were now a Che Guevara styled Mickey Mouse t-shirt hanging in a mid-western Wal-Mart. No greater movement was envision-able and no greater movement manifests. Labor was run by old men who’d survived the commie purges and had made their bread off of facilitating a stasis with the bosses, they did not understand the new working class, these new long hairs and civil rights advocates – they were needlessly rocking the boat. All union leverage had been lost, capitalism is now global – the plants can be shut down and moved elsewhere where a new slave class will work for less. For years, the company buys you off, your battles are for temporary, immediate things like wages while you forfeit the real power: a seat at the table. By the 80’s, those small battles are revoked, those gains erased, the working class stranded and fucked. And really though, who can blame them? The bed was made so so long ago, the reservoir long spiked, your back against the fucking wall – you need to eat, you need a home, you need to keep your family safe and you need to secure some kind of future for your children. What the fuck else can you do? What a fucking brutal choice. This position forced onto our people is a cruel tragedy that our rulers have never had to answer for – it is a protracted crime against the very soul of the American people and it is a crime for which there has never been any justice.

There is another wound that has festered and come to completely change and define our reality. The Lordstown Strike of 1972 is a neat flash point for how horrible and bleak and dull the future to come will be. General Motors builds a state-of-the-art auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. It is, by all standards, the most efficient and advanced factory in the entire world. Cars could be made insanely fast with a skeleton crew. But as history has shown us, technology in the hands of Capitalism will not be used to elevate humanity, it will be used to generate wealth mercilessly and devoid of empathy. The Lordstown Strike was not for wages or benefits or material gains – it was a strike against the nature of the work itself. This technological achievement of production was a monolith of existential horror. The workers were different, the cultural awakening of the Vietnam War, of Civil Rights, of the whole shit show, had given a peak under the veil and they saw the nested terror holding everything up. They were poor, some long-hairs, some vets coming back home. The work was completely removed from them, so repetitive, so unfulfilling, so bone-breakingly boring and empty that they could feel themselves losing something to it that they could not get back. The alienation was total, the machines blank and uncaring – was this what their life was worth? Was it so easily reduced down to an abstract exchange – were they really to be rendered so meaningless and inhuman just for the ‘gift’ of a home and to not starve? This is what the masters have handed down. We were supposed to be grateful. To me, this is a grim, dark bell tolling out and its dull wavelengths have only gotten more intense as it fades beyond our audible range.

I was born in south central Pennsylvania. The place feels pretty fatal. Three hours from Philly, three from Pitt, three from Baltimore, three from the state capital, two miles from the Maxon-Dixon. Gettysburg is my home town and you get a strange look if you say it any other way than ‘Gettisburg’ - I was just born there though, it had the best hospital in the area at the time; most of my live was spent in the adjacent Franklin County. It’s in a valley basin, the Appalachian Mountains a sort of permanent back drop in every direction at a seemingly fixed distance of far away but not quite. The mountains remove it from the gentle hills and fields of the rest of the state, from southward jagged crags of West Virginia. One wouldn’t be completely mistaken if they described it, geographically and otherwise, as somewhat of a gutter. It’s also accurately and more favorable described a secluded and walled off place. The name is apt, known since the Civil War as The Valley of the Shadow. The landscape of an area can’t help but have imparted onto it a strange, physical reflection of its people. Histories and cultures and lives are expressed perhaps in a way unreachable by other means. Outsiders typically experience the maintained tourist routes, looking out bored over underwhelming battlefields, a bunch of rock fences, runs of trees giving way to more greenish and iron-brown fields. Few except the residences know the feel of a lone, rusting washing machine kicked down a ditch on an isolated back road. The old pioneer paths have long since been transformed into highways connecting the region into dots of civilization and from them off shoots of poorly tar-paved roads tangle out leading to everywhere else. Maybe there is a dirt caked mattress on the shore of an algae strangled pond, surrounded by old nylon fishing line, out there where a road winds strange, there for what might as well be forever, will be there for forever. Hunks of cars and tractors decades ancient, overgrown with sumac like a treaty reached. There are literal one-stop-light hamlets, piles of Sheetz bags split and blown across every yard. A hill of bursting trash bags inexplicable in a waterlogged house, nothing else around but uneven patches of gravel as a reminder that once maybe there was a drive way or an improvised parking lot there. There is an old trading post that’d been re-purposed over and over again until now it sat ruined, surrounded by what remains of a seventies-era trailer park, also ruined. Farm houses and barns gaping to the elements while modern stables and silos loom fifty yards away. Discarded clothes rained on so many times that they are cemented to a shattered sidewalk. You get the feeling, from all directions, of being held hostage by something very big and not understood, by the great weight of a past un-navigable. It is harsh in a way not quite overtly placed, like an inevitable blood land, like a catastrophe incompletely dodged repeatedly under changing definitions of loss and suffering and desolation. This region has been here since the beginning of the country, since American civilization began, and with it is a unique touch of a squirming, desperate empire of many shed skins. I don’t think there is a place like this anywhere. To me, at least, the landscape says a lot about the people. About my people. The place where my family and my blood has always been for longer than anyone can remember.

There is a vital piece of the Labor Movement that I’ve saved until now, because it is intimately close to me, and that’s the place of Appalachia. Coal miners in Appalachia have always been a backbone of the class struggle and they were also one of the few, rare outliers who answered the State’s call in kind – with violence and vengeance. What would happen is the coal company would go to a poor town that had coal – sometimes there was already a mine there, sometimes not – and they’d buy up the land it was on, all the land around it, sometimes the entire town. Because of the sloped ridges and mountains, it was very hard and sometimes impossible to farm the land even if you managed to keep it when the company moved in, so the inhabitants of the towns didn’t have much of a choice, they work the mine or they leave. The company buys up the houses or sets up a camp of cramped huts on the outskirts or both and are kind enough to let the town residents stay there as long as they work – they don’t own the houses anymore and never will; the company does. Same with the shops, the only store is now the company store. They did get paid, but it was company scrip that could only be used in the company stores, could only buy basic goods under ceiling-less markups. If you need more scrip, don’t worry, the company has positions available for your children. The workers organized and there were a series of strikes-turned-skirmishes called the Coal Wars. The townsfolk would rise up, build bombs, arm themselves with guns and bats and chains, and they would assault the work yards and the company men. They set fire to the storehouses, blew up the train cars, they rigged nail bombs on bridges and the other egresses in and out of the townships. The army would be called, the company would send more men, often the workers were put down only to storm the gates again. Sometimes they won. Can you imagine that? It seems so strange and wild now, but it happened, for decades on end. It’s hard to see what other option they could have chosen or rather it is easy to understand that this was the option they chose. This was their home, this was their families, their whole life, everything – what way is a better way to die? Here, knee bent, in these holes for nothing or by lashing out and gutting the bosses to maybe secure some kind of future? Blood for blood or blood for the company? There is no exit, there is no future, we will die and take as many with us as we can. It’s go time. One particular moment stands out – not because it is uniquely poetic or especially brutal or even effective (though it would trigger a chain reaction to win the region for workers), but because it was a nationwide media sensation: the 1920 Matewan Massacre.

The UMWA had been doing some work across the country securing a powerful foothold. The unions had a streak of successful strikes and made a push to take the old Appalachian mines in. The Stone Mountain Coal Corporation hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency in response. The workers called them the ‘Baldwin Thugs’ because they did thug shit – suited and armed with sub-machine guns, they enforced mass firings and evictions through bureaucratic and physical means, they secured warrants of arrest from State police forces and carried them out on labor leaders and members, they smashed union meetings and nascent strikes with force. The town of Matewan had just signed onto the UMWA’s roster and went on strike and Stone Mountain sent The Thugs. Twelve Agency men took the train to Matewan. Throughout the day, they handed out mass evictions of company houses – the last of the workers to have homes as a majority of the town had already been forced to spend the spring in tents - sending shock waves out into the community. They ate dinner and set to leave, were met at the train station by Sheriff Hatfield and his deputy and Matewan’s mayor Cabell Testerman. Hatfield moved to arrest them under the mayor’s authority but the Agency men produced their own warrants, fraudulent ones, for the execution of Hatfield, his deputy, and several others. The confrontation turns and the Baldwin Thugs killed the mayor on the platform, but what they didn’t know was that they had been slowly surrounded. Peaking out of windows, crouched behind coal skips, standing on the building tops were heavily armed miners. The mayor bled out ground and the miners descended and all of Baldwin-Felts men were killed. A fuse was lit and full-scale conflict broke out in the coming months, eventually Stone Mountain yielding to the workers’ demands. This shaped Appalachia by a number of positive measures, unfortunately there was perhaps a much greater consequence that would change the people in a slight, but ultimately damning way to be inherit by the future.

The Matewan Massacre and the murder trial of the Baldwin-Felts men against Sheriff Hatfield and Deputy Chambers was trending nationwide. Reporters flooded the region. Maybe the two best things about this were that some light was shed on the workers’ plights and a lot of dope City of God-type pictures of miners posing with guns and bombs. The bad was how the narrative would be framed and how the area would painted for years to come in America’s collective consciousness. From coast to coast, at any street corner, you could read about these dumb, violent hill people. Animals, really, fiercely territorial and fearful of outsiders, so much so that they killed all these nicely dressed men just trying to do their job. These stupid and dirty country poors who only love violence and whiskey. Don’t they want jobs? Who could be so lazy and ungrateful? What moral deficiency. And they were filthy reds too, on top of everything else! I wonder how shocked the people from my birthplace would be to hear that a hundred years ago Bolshevik and Redneck were used interchangeably. The miners wore red bandannas around their necks to signal unity with the unions, they’d pull them over their faces in battle so the company knew not a one but the whole of them were their enemies. So, media called them Rednecks as a slur and in kind the workers took it as a point of pride. The murder case went to acquittal and Stone Mountain filed conspiracy charges, but it was a ruse – the Baldwin Thugs assassinated Hatfield and his deputy on the McDowell County Courthouse steps, surrounded by hundreds of Rednecks and reporters.

This history put a seed in the heart of the Appalachian people, but after so long and with much tampering, the history is largely lost and locked away and mutated beyond root, leaving a gathered soul marooned. The seed is now cultured in mold and invading growths wheel spoke outward. The seed is still there in the depths but has been amended and starved into a pinging, sharp stone by the conquest of capitalism. I carry it too. In the Valley of the Shadow, everywhere generational and divergent death is felt. Some skin of righteous failure and defeat bound by layer upon layer of scab. I’ve talked to those close to me that had spent their lives there and they feel it too, and not a one of us have ever been able to describe it cleanly. Housebroken in a way that reverberated onto future generations, a deep pride and resolve alongside an almost intrinsically felt ghost of cowardice and failure. Like a funereal and ephemeral common regret for something hidden. Appalachia has been told what it was and as everything was slowly milled, that was all that was left to hold on to and internalize. Fear of outsiders, dumb and dirty, poor and low, the love of violence and to get fucked up – and also, a subterranean sense of being morally deficient that is so unbearable and untenable that it must be passed among one another. I feel this in me, too. This is what is handed down and it is your pride now as a people. A conquered people. And ironically, the outsiders won, had long won. There’s a lot of clout there now in being a Redneck, a lot of identities eked out of being a fierce, individualistic Redneck. And that is their birthrate but it doesn’t mean the same thing – what an overwhelming cruelty that is. The conquest co-opts all resistance and makes it a mechanism of the conquest.

As a teenager in the Valley, the area was wound together tightly and seemed to brace for an oncoming end epoch. A boiling point was beginning to be reached. The big fear was big department stores and fast food chains coming in to put everyone out of business. There were some already but larges swathes of land were now being bought up and construction sites sprawled out where before it wouldn’t have been imaginable. It was a strange sight to see a CVS for the first time – what, are we Philly now? Are they trying to make us into weak city folk? People went to town halls with purpose and shouted. Lots of NIMBY feels and Ron Paul signs going up. And at the same time, this was the Bush-era and this was a place that always, as though to spite the state’s cities, voted red. A rebel flag flew for many years at my high school, a thirty minute drive from the Gettysburg battlefields. America shit was big, this isolated outpost in the culture war. I understand it now, but at the time it was deeply confusing to me and the small band of young people around me who’d somehow found intensely leftist ideas. There were some older twenty somethings who’d never left, or tried but eventually moved back and from them certain books and music were sort of handed down and traded among us, changing our paths. There was still some kind of mainstream culture and we had found ourselves outside of it for the first time. This was a time and place where Rap vs. Rock vs. Country was a very coveted and hotly contested cultural debate. But something broke through to us and I still feel so so lucky for that. Indie music, hardcore and screamo, holy fuck look at this shit, do you know what Crust Punk is? MCR is some pussy shit, have you heard of The Locust? Here’s a CD-r of this band called The Mountain Goats – they only use acoustic guitars, but in a good way, it’s a little boring at first but has the best lyrics. The infrastructure was just being set up that you could get the internet – most business didn’t even have websites until years after, and when they did they were like geocity-esque Java eyesores. It seemed unheard of for anyone over thirty to even know what email was – remember, this is 2006, that is how isolated the area was and how isolated we were. With the internet, we could see outside of the Valley and more than anything else, we felt trapped and submerged in a dead-end. And like an inmate decorating their cell, there was a sort of social capital in the media we consumed. We had not quite grasped that cyberspace was and always had been capitalist cyberspace and that these commodities were not much of a material to be defined by, that it was not much different from the full speed AMERICA fever of the region. But the internet was still a place we had to go to, a place you had to physically go to instead of something you always carried around in your pocket. It was a place you could leave. When we came of age, most of us moved away. Two weeks after I graduated I moved to Seattle.

After almost ten years in Seattle, I had mistakenly thought it was a polluted sample to measure the rest of the country against. It seems quaint and dumbly precious to remember a public bus ride where nobody was on a smartphone – in innocuous ways over time, technology moved forward and dominated and it was a real ass bummer to slowly feel that happening without directly realizing it. It got harder to look at a human face, something incredibly isolating in another’s gaze, a creeping sense of violation to human contact and shared spaces. But this was Seattle! It was the big city baby and a cultural icon! A tech haven! Nowhere but here, amirite? So, I didn’t quite understand that maybe a more universal thing was happening. When I had fucked up way too many times for the high standards of Seattle living, I got out and went back home. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting but I did not expect how much these two place would be the same.

I’d moved with Lyn to Chambersburg, somewhere that was of great personal importance to me – it was the closest you got to ‘urban’ when I was a teenager and where you went to see people in basements or coffee shops. Of course, that shit was all gone coming back. The development of corporate franchises that the region feared before had already run its course, in fact it was overshot – a lot of those stores had long gone out of business leaving big, empty retail skeletons beside the highways in expanded marches of grave-like trails. Local establishments, unless there is some corporate element, were all on the verge closing – very few made enough to manage equilibrium and way less than that made gains.
The area is maybe poorer than ever though there is a glut of employment to be had. Fast food jobs, retail jobs, an insane number of warehouse jobs, and basically that was it. Working for the city was a long shot because it is either locked behind higher education or was construction – and no public works were being planned anymore. The primary employers were temp agencies, many many temp agencies with positions that flung you to Lancaster or some place like that every day. I stopped the labor history right before Reagan wilded out and cumshoted the Air Traffic Controller’s union, but work didn’t stop, its nature continued to change until thirty years later we have what we have now. What is reserved for the working class is alienating beyond the pale. Retail and service jobs plunge through another barrier – what is handed down now is mostly tedious menial and emotional labor. Not just is your labor a commodity to trade but now your emotional well-being, your private head space to an abstract market – you are expected to violate yourself, the basic tenets of humanity on offer. No regard is given to what that could do to a person, what it does to someone after years. I mean, you don’t have to do it, you could always let everything fall apart, this is a land of liberty and freedom after all. This work had completely taken over the Valley. And unfortunately that stubborn, almost puritan work ethic had been dragged through the change of labor to modernity, along with the moral proselytizing toward poverty. A confusing and uniform annihilation for a place like this, a place with its past. An off-duty waitress explodes at a drive-thru order taker for coming off rude. A cashier with a kid at home seethes with hate when a shopper comes with a cart full of groceries and presents a WIC card. The cycle repeats a million times. Everyone is hostile and tired and miserable and stranded with just their life – no patience or means or energy to make a community. The need for one, though, still throbs underneath, unable to be shed completely.

Like Seattle, the internet had vastly changed the area. People dressed the same as people did in Seattle but also they dressed the same that they had when I was in high school – there wasn’t a mainstream consensus anymore and there wasn’t a sense of something being underground or counter-cultural. Culture had flattened out entirely, media became interlocking concentric circles in pulsing repetition, everything new and old at once, no markers of time passed or of a present unfolding or a future incoming. When growing up, everyone had always complained that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do and now there was even less, but you didn’t hear that complaint – no one was bored, if they had to time to be, with a phone or a laptop or a console or drugs, though no one seemed completely entertained or interested. But still, this was Appalachia, so there was a brutal, fatalistic death drive to everything, and alienation and social media had bent the circuit; at once, nothing matters and everything is urgently important. No slight or act too petty to not swear to retaliate, but no strife too deadly as to move from its path. Ride-or-die was attributed a lot of with a pretty baseless bar of entry and likewise a minimal threshold for revocation. Most of the time, it was like politics and beliefs and even basic conversation were only for IM and FB profiles. Harrowing shit would come out online, while face to face was relatively chill, if not almost blank feeling. But all this shit was very real and true and honestly felt, and it was also equally disposable. It was a semi-rare thing to see somebody have a hobby or something like a passion, unless you count drugs or gaming or binge watching a streaming service’s offerings. Depressingly few and far between. The conquest of capitalism has atomized everyone by design. Not intentionally, not by any one person’s hand or decision, but by the accumulation of dehumanizing and selfish acts and policies – we’ve traced out a whole history of this and now we have its sum. We live it, queasily at that.

During the Civil War, the Confederates had been burned Chambersburg to the ground twice so there is a certain bit of dark humor in how often you hear fire engines ripping through the narrow street. I couldn’t understand it for a few months, how once a day at least you heard a fire siren, there couldn’t possibly be this many fires, until I realized that the fire department was called every time there was an overdose. A very heavy dark joke. Drugs are like hyper-illegal here, the laws strict and unkind, every one of those overdoses most likely resulted in an arrest before a corpse. And everyone knows someone intimately who has been pulled into them or they themselves have and escaped, but nevertheless there is absolutely minimal sympathy. Ex-users are usually the worst offenders – they stopped so anyone could if they wanted it enough, so the thought follows. There’s a lot of drug dealing but by far some of the worst drug dealers I have ever met. Equal parts an ad-hoc goodfellas mindset gleamed from movies and whatever complete with complex systems of dumb codes and three-step meetups, and painfully uncomfortable casualness – sometimes after three hours of texts, the plug would be too sketched and the deal would fall through, while posting twenty pics of just them holding bags of weed on IG. Sometimes you meet up at a Hardee’s and they are desperately trying to get you to smoke a blunt with them while walking around the parking lot in the middle of the day. I’m unconvinced that the driving motivator was financial – shit is constantly fronted and forgotten, accounting errors with alarming frequency, plugs perpetually broke – but more so the social interaction dealing facilitated. It was one of the few communities available to you where you had to meet someone physically, the profit incentive and exchange of goods pushing you to fulfill a very basic human need. And you get to get high.

Another similar system is the area’s most popular Facebook group, ‘Chambersburg Buy, Sell, Trade’. At over 40,000 members, its a sort of virtual yard sale. Something is posted up, the price or trade negotiated, then a meeting place is agreed upon. Since there isn’t an electronic payment method in place and there isn’t a way to track ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actors, there are constant feuds and shit talking, enemies made and weird digital power moves to dominate the competition on, say, novelty plates or weed wacker parts. A small corner a kind of black market of lotions, shampoos, toilet paper obviously stolen and available for pick up at the Wal-Greens parking lot until someone says something too uppity or whatever and the police are called. That there is not much a legal case to be made is besides the point. What I’ve seen is a deep tradition of holding on to whatever you can. Hoarding is a stark and real problem. People piling up bags of clothes, broken TVs, old iPod bases, knick-knacks. It wasn’t uncommon to struggle to move through a house packed with boxes, rooms barred for storage of essentially useless things. Half like preparation and half just, well, I don’t know. Maybe something to tie you, to see that you have something. It makes me think of the landscape, how things built sixty years ago aren’t torn down, just new stuff built around them until their use and purpose is lost, then new stuff built around those ruins. How things abandoned sit forever, to lay where they lay.

I was told I lived in a bad part of town, but what that meant was we were the only white people for about three blocks. The standard xenophobia applied, black people were criminals or lazy or both and anyone who was brown were stealing jobs – a particularly shaky claim given the surplus of jobs. I’m not a demographic whatever guy, but if I had to call it, it looked to me that at most the town was 60% white. Nevertheless, it was a ‘white’ town, the ‘outsiders’ well established, not directly ever stated but in the typical conglomerations of dog whistles. Ultimately meaningless divides here, everyone was poor and pitted against each other probably because they could feel something deeply wrong but don’t have the language or tools to express it and maybe I don’t either; I am desperately trying. There is a comfort in cruelty and hate and self-infliction—it is a way to live, there is a certain amount of security and safety to be found in it. It never occurs to anyone that the ones to blame are the business owners and the corporations, maybe because those targets are far away. In the end, the companies won and the miners lost. The money and power never stayed in the area, all of it like the coal, extracted and taken away. What they fought for is done, their ancestry inherited temp jobs and shells of chain stores. Maybe a fear of outsiders is a just feeling that should have been pursued – outside forces came in, tore apart the land for anything valuable, razed it all, and left. For a hundred years. It is a series of ruins on top of ruins and the people haven’t been able to hold onto to anything. Because of how the townships were laid out two centuries ago, the only place you can drop a string of department stores and warehouses and fast food joints is right outside a town, a lot like the company labor camps.

Mining is done differently now. They’ve pulled out more coal in the last twenty years than they ever did back in the day, with a fraction of the manpower. What they do now is they blow up the mountain tops, dragline cranes pull all the rubble down. A machine breaks it all up in to gravel and sorts the coal and minerals out. It gets loaded into trucks and sent away. What’s left behind can’t be put back, it’s just small rocks and grit, it can’t build anything new either. They call it ‘overburden’. So, they dump it all into a dug out pit, 500 feet deep of useless stone. Locally, the people call the pits ‘quarries’.

The conquest is near completed, this is late stage capitalism. The total translation of survival into abstracted concepts. Marketed ruthlessly individuality within a society not much interested in the value of individuals beyond a free form roster that can be banded to protect it and buy shit – a vacuum of sovereign agents granted recondite unity when this important tension is threatened. With this individually, so goes power’s culpability. And now the internet brings the final tax. Capitalist cyberspace, like the frontier of our founding, is another pressure valve to class struggle. For the last five years or so, we have never been able to truly leave the internet and capitalist cyberspace – more and more people enter and far less disconnect. It can’t be helped but to see some kind of shock to humanity taking place similar to the alienation of the Industrial Revolution – but instead, this is an alienation we bring to our home by a somewhat gunpoint choice. Not, of course, the same as stepping onto the factory floor but not wholly dissimilar. The tremendous strain and weight of modernity. There is an eerie similarity between our repetitive, menial job and how our free time is spent on loops of familiar consumption, in how our culture seems to rebirth the past – each birth like a formal passage, collapsing time and the distances between time’s way points, life defined via fetish unfixed from time. Most visions of what will come next, of our possible futures, are rarely beyond re-imaginings of our past, are rarely beyond the end of right now. Usually a total end.

It is more revealing and perhaps accurate to think of the wide array of consumer products that form much of our freedoms, and the causal availability of tech like smartphones and computers that essentially renders them mundane, as a monkey’s paw bribe to not fucking freak out and rip apart those holding rule. But maybe this is wishful thinking, very probably once this germ is set, there is no alternative – maybe we are severed. If you feel isolated, how else could you feel when the most natural and automatic thing of community is something you must actively pursue, sometimes to literally no avail. Have you ever broken a phone and then for days the creep of being alone gets heavier, at first almost comforting like a weighted blanket, but then it begins to sour, imagine being under that blanket as it grows too heavy to lift and the room grows warmer. We fall off the earth, out of almost every social circle, even if physically we are so close, your connection to others locked behind a paywall. Even if you go out and ‘engage’, part of every other person is still locked away in that space and barred from you – they are still commanded by something you are ‘free’ of, a facilitated circuit that continues without your presence.

In a way, the body horror and grotesque visions of cyberpunk, with wires plugging one into a joint consciousness of digital plots, or of invasive, bulky tech mixing gristle and blood and code – these at least give space for some kind of other, of a tactile contract being made, instead of the sneaking petition to our wills that a smartphone is. Our choice seems more benign, our removal more of a creeping canceling. It is much easier to not recognize how we are changed with a suffocation so gradual. An economy of attention gripped by death spiral inflation, attention yielding increasingly diminished returns.

When we found out we were tracked, that careful records had been stored for years about our financial histories, our locations, our media consumption, mainly it was met with a great, quaking shrug. We weren’t up to something, the information was unimportant – and that is telling. If that information is not important, what does that reflect on how we understand the moment to moment pieces that encompass our lived reality. How is it possible to escape being defined by these habits in some way, how is it possible to not see our world constructed from this fabric, like a moebius sinkhole. Somewhere deep, ostensibly recoiling while being defined by these things and also being defined by the recoiling. If everything is boiled down to a commodity, to abstracted lines of traded commodity, if nothing can be understood outside of these trappings any longer, a bargaining takes place with ourselves and existences outside of what we are so submerged inside are disregarded, erased – a great, great recoiling beneath very still skin. The tremendous strain and weight of a horrifying and dull modernity, changing us, an ‘us’ now conquered and displaced piecemeal somehow, small variations of occupation, something like a white noise machine growing louder and louder at a crawl, at a pace slow enough that it is impossible to imagine life outside of the hidden roar. The self-awareness had of ads and products and media of the ‘90s and ‘00s has completely folded, they are completely integrated into our experience. There is no separation. All we have to understand our reality are these things.

Capitalism has made an environment in which that switch that keeps you from self destructive behavior is off, it’s pushed to the corner behind stacks of distractions, it is fixed above, visible and out of reach – all of which you could climb to flip it crumples under your weight, and even if somehow you are able to manage sure ground and you touch the switch, you lack the leverage to restore your circuit. Work your job like holding a dead man’s switch, unaware of who placed the device in your palm.

Its a harmful thing to be cut into individuals that must chase individualism. It puts the entire weight of failure into individual moral terms instead of on a system that creates and encourages it. The limits of what we can lose ourselves in are gone – its a seemingly endless pit to wad up inside. Who can blame anyone else? We are trying to fucking survive and mean something somehow – what drives a person to marry a big tiddy cartoon character or eat themselves immobile? Its not a moral failing, it is a desperate reflex to an obliterating system. A great recoiling. These ways we entomb ourselves, downward sloping catacombs too dark to make out the dead breaking to sediment by our shuffling foot falls. Capitalism has changed our brains. I’ve seen someone homeless for six months finally get a good paycheck at a gas station and secure a place to live, only spend it all on shoes from Amazon the night before and I used to wonder why. When I was out of work, I went to the library every day to use the wi-fi to search for a job and without fail, for two months, there was a girl in dirty clothes on the computer. She would be there for hours on the computer, when her time ran out on one she would move to another, and the whole time without exception she was building a house in a Sims-like browser game, until one day she wasn’t there anymore, and I used to wonder why. I’ve seen so many hoarder houses, I’ve seen anime dungeons constructed by lonely people with evictions weeks away. I used to wonder how someone blazes a darkly winding path toward Q and Stormfront forums. We can try to destroy this thing, so even if we cannot escape, those after us can. Intense horse vibes, intense horse energy. Can we, for a moment, get some Fs rolling in the chat.