Join the new world

-- Just some food for thought from the Indigenous Resistance Liberated Zone of the Armed Freedom Socialists, somewhere deep in the heart of Appalachia


"Ask for work. If you don't get work, ask for cornbread. If you don't get work or cornbread, take the cornbread." -- Conrad Goldman



The Appalachian region is the ancestral home of sundry propagandists by word, organization and deed.

Volatirine De Cleyre grew her anarcho-syndicalism while living amongst and learning from poor immigrants in Philadelphia.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones spat curses and broke the backs of strikebreakers throughout the coal belt with an armory of kitchen utensils and a legion of pissed-off mothers, daughters and wives of striking miners.

The egalitarian and communal structures and constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, the People of the Longhouse, was an excellent example of communism in living and a major inspiration for works on property and the state by those leftie Euro-intellectuals like Marx and Luxemburg.








Appalachia teaches us to work and organize, to teach and learn together. We win when we couple traditional and contemporary leftist ideas created through the collective efforts of all walks of Appalachian folk: black, anti-racist womanists; queer syndicalists; leftist-organizing coal miners' daughters, agragrian anarcho-communists; and link up these struggle with our like-minded metropolitan sisters and brothers.

If you're a tourist (especially a metropolitan) then clear your mind of all misconceptions. Read, learn, educate your communities about the reality of Appalachia. Oppose and reject the predominant false narrative about doleful, ignorant hicks.

Appalachian compatriots far and wide, spread the wor😛 Raise hell and eat cornbread, Comrades!







Cornbread communism is a contested space. The embrace of it is a task of forging Appalachian worker unity across these contestations.

Some support blunt-force anti-capitalism on a Stalinist model. Others want to prepare and organize for the inevitable collapse of world-burning eco-genocidal-capitalism. Everything in between. And many that not in between at all.

Anarcho-Maoists, moonshine-swilling wobblies, pawpaw-fisted syndicalists, ginseng and ramp Diggers, Bolshevik mothmen, agrarian mutualists, androgynous & hairy eco-anarchists, apple-farming autonomists, freegan feminist freedom fighters, Soup-bean Social Ecologists, Kentucky Black Panthers, actual Kentucky panthers, anti-authoritarian haints, snake-handling preachers of the Social Gospel, strippers against strip mining, guerillas in the misty war on coal, banjo-playing Trotskyists, situationist coal miners, gramscian raft guides, and Clinch Mountain stirneristas.

All share these 2 commitments: the people of Appalachia should seize the means of production and reproduction from the capitalists and ensure socialized access to and control of these means, socially distributing their fruits AND that the history of revolutionary action throughout Appalachia, as well as the region's cultural and natural resources, serve as better guides for the Appalachian revolution and Appalachian communism than any imported yankee-eurasian socialist tradition.

Massive industrialization is not the answer to every problem. Radicalized Appalachian hunting and gathering is as radicalizing as socializing Appalachian industry. Illegitimate economic actors -- the backwoods family with a still, the quilting Meemaw, musicians from the holler -- are as important revolutionary actors as the traditional and service-industry proletariat.



The only way to survive when the shit hits the fan is TOGETHER.



The history of Appalachia is the story of class war and colonialism. Euro-powers claimed the region. The wealthy carved it up. Politicians and gold seekers tore up its native roots, slaughtered its inhabitants and sent them far away.

Industrialists forced it hill folks into capitalism, and made them pay for the corn they grew, the coal they mined and the timber they cut. Today their successors value capital over blood and sweat. They demand service and offer crumbs. They lock up your friends and family for attempting to escape the pain.

They literally flood the people with opioids. We are in a condition of soullessness in a heartless world.








Resistance is not futile. Though assigned a fatal stereotype, Appalachians have always resisted. With war in the coal fields, with protest, with strikes, by escape, by secrets, by class loyalty. Junaluska promised to return and he did. The moonshiners tarred and feathered the tax collectors. The miners raised their rifles against the bosses and their hoards of corporate cops. The welfare state tried to buy us but it has failed because it wasn't by the people, it was only to make the people docile.

Success comes from taking. Rewards are ready for every gate hopped over, every pipeline taken, every creek, holler and field cleared of the plague of modern oligarchy.




Appalachia in origin and in spirit, in the real world, is the heartland of cornbread communism, which means community. It is knowing your neighbor's struggles. It is reaching a hand out to help. Or just holding a hand and saying, "Together, we'll get through this." It's being there when the lord ain't and the creeks are rising.

Cornbread communism means community participation, strengthening relationships regardless of color or pronouns. Appalachia is our garden. Without dedication and love, it cannot thrive.

The working people of Appalachia have long been exploited by outside interests. Many have fallen through the widening cracks of capitalism. It's time to rise to the challenges.




Capitalism has robbed us of our rich communal heritage, forcing us to toil in service to bosses who only care for profit. We've forgotten how important it is to throw up a hand in greeting. Instead we're trained to fear each other. We don't know each other any more.

We long for a deeper connection, to truly support our neighbors, to stand with them in times of need. Restoring Appalachia means bringing our tradition of care into the present. Let's bring the spirit of solidarity up to date, leaving behind any racism, sexism, xenophobia, and bigotry.

It's time to pull on our galluses, hitch up the mule, and, once more, till the fertile soil of solidarity. There's plenty of planting and harvesting to do before the fall of capitalism comes round.








Cornbread is the culinary symbol of Appalachia, our home. Putting a focus on cornbread helps others take a gander at the work and problems at hand.

The farm-and-food economy has been exploited even longer than the industrial and service sectors. The closing of the commons, plantation slavery, sharecropping, the hacienda system out west, and contemporary exploitation of migration labor.

The mountains of Appalachia are not immune to this type of exploitation, but we're also home to a liberatory type of agriculture -- the mountain homestead, the forest farm.

Cornbread is the food of independent poor people. Mountain farmers found barely enough flat ground to grow enough corn to get their families through a winter. Enough to make some whiskey if they were lucky.

Cornbread stands for independence from markets, for the freedom to not engage in buying and selling except for luxuries. The cornbread farm is reminder than another world is possible. There can be a type of rural life, a type of farm economy, that is not reliant on exploitation and destruction.

Cornbread is a political symbol.

Cornbread is also a symbol of solidarity, of unity-in-diversity. Beans and cornbread are a staple of white Appalachian cuisine, of black soul food, and in a slightly different form, of Latin American cuisine. Cherokee bean bread is a cornbread. Cornbread is a symbol of solidarity with campesinos worldwide.

The power of racism and colonialism in the Americas is directly oppressive, of course, but it is also indirectly oppressive -- it disrupts our ability to organize with each other and support each other.

It might sound a little grandiose, but cornbread is foodway that can help forge solidarity across these oppressive structures.








The derisive terms, painted on asphalt from the point of view of a street-pigeon snitch: "Hillbilly, Redneck, Trash", are staples of the dominant narrative of Appalachian folk. We turn these into a point of pride in a shared revolt against robber barons, despots, cops and copperheads. Our fore-kin, bound together by red bandannas, mined the hills of ore. Then they were tossed out as to nutriate the badland for would-be masters.

Disparate but alike in marginalization, they poured the cast to forge something viable for their own. They seasoned the skillet with the blood of centuries-struggle, so that we might one day be truly free.

We stand in the nexus of the rat-king, where bigots, fascists, and capitalist swine have met to make their "homes". Metropolitans have off-loaded their litter, expecting us to take out their trash. But despite centralized control over printer, press, and pundit, we own these words and our story.

We do not simply write "Resist". We live it.