Funny enough, there’s a long history of worker’s struggle in the Appalachians and South.
Redneck Revolt is a good group organizing in these areas around this identity and history.
Yeah regions where mining, agriculture, and similar industries are dominant tend to have a history of socialist organizing and labor agitation, funny how that works
i love how many people are commenting on this basically saying it’s an oxymoron for rednecks to be communists like… in what universe is it an oxymoron for… actual poor and working-class people… to be invested in an ideology & movement that centers around working-class/labor struggle… lmao ????
literally the only reason why there has been a shift in later years is cus of fear mongering to the point where capitalist criticism has become a taboo even for lower class poor people. like many the southern states are some of the poorest states in usa??
“Let’s show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!”
-Woody Guthrie
coming from a non-informed point of view i feel like once again this is Reagan’s fault because he targeted workers unions a good deal…
People are saying its a oxymoron because “redneck” is usually synonymous with “racist/stupid af” in america. And “racist/stupid af” in america tends to steer very far right.
But there is a actually a whole population of “redneck” that isnt racist at all. They’re actually pretty well educated, theyre just poor and do poor people stuff. They’re the ones who end up introducing black people to white people shit. Like moonshine, mudding and camping. Theyre a trip to hang around.
Theres actually a lot of overlap in the “redneck” and the “hood” culture (large tight knit families, general disdain for authorities, love of bbq…etc), but the rich white people in power dont want people to know that because if the all the poor people reguardless of color realize they have shared interests band together and raise hell. Its over for the 1%. So they try their hardest to emphasize and exaggerate the cultural differences, in hopes of convincing the low income disenfranchized whites to vote right.
I LOVE capitalist critical Appalachian culture. One of the first things i learned that fueled my interest was the origin of the word ‘redneck.’
Coal mining was HUGE from the mid 1700s to the early 1900s in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania as coal was a primary source of fuel for a lotta shit. Unsurprisingly, mine owners were capitalist pigs and exploited the hell outta coal miners. Like, paying them by the pound of coal they brought in rather than by hours worked, paying them in vouchers that could only be used at the store owned by the mining company, and offering no kind of health assistance when workers would inevitably succumb to illness and injury caused by the work they did. So miners began to unionize in the mid 1840s. To show solidarity and to make their employers take notice, unionists would wear red bandanas around their necks. And thus, the term ‘redneck’ was coined to describe the union supporters who eventually dismantled a lot of the exploitive practices used by the coal industry.
Love these! Just discovered the hillbilly leftie podcast the Trillbilly Worker’s Party, and I am so excited to see more leftist organizing in these parts. We have an amazing history of labor struggle, and a fair amount of labor wins, in this region.
I don’t have the cultural lens to read these kind of images in an US
context, but as a European it is very bewildering to me how the hammer
and the sickle became a shorthand for “worker’s struggle” “unionize” and
“support poor people” in the USA. Like. Millions of people were
murdered under that symbol for not fitting into an ideology.
I mean. What ????
Seems
very reductive to say the least. Symbols have meaning, and sometimes
they just don’t really mean what people in the US think they mean. Also,
propaganda is a thing, and is still effective even decades after the
fall of the USSR, as this shows.
Ask people who grew up under the “hammer and sickle” what they think about it !!
The
US idea of communism is heavily shaped by hollywood. It’s either an
enemy image of the red scare that acts as a perfect foil of “the other”.
Or it gets romantisized in the shape of the old farmer grandma in
Siberia who works hard and suffers but is still somehow content with her
fate and will offer you vodka with a teethless smile.
That’s a
fantasy. In Europe we have similar fantasies, too, of the USA. Either the
country solely consists of uncultured and brutal Texans, or it’s freedom
and happy cultural diversity in New York and California. In one fantasy
Europeans feel entitled to look down on the USA, in the other it’s an
abstract idealistic place of endless possibilities.
That’s hella reductive too.
In
any case, to look at something from a different culture, to take it,
to misunderstand it, and to assign it a completely different meaning is a
habit US Americans AND Europeans historically share, unfortunately.
Tell
me why the hammer and sickle in the US is not a form of cultural
appropriation. They don’t share the history, they don’t have the same
visceral reaction to it people have who grew up under it. They take it
and give it new meaning for their own purposes, disregarding what
history or survivors of this symbol say. Honestly. Tell me why this is
different ?
Thoughtfulfangirling 